How Important Are Backlinks in SEO? (2022)

Are your competitors who have fewer backlinks and less content than you rank higher? This is how to use backlinks in SEO properly and why you should win these rankings.

Is it Considered Spam Getting Thousands of Links from One Site?

It’s situational whether it will be spam or not.

It is essential to determine if backlinks in SEO are natural or paid.

Natural links include:

• Companies that link to other brands through their footers or their main navigation to switch between stores.
• A sidebar listing of resources and other reading is a sign that you are an authority blogger.
• If you produce a lot of photo content and the website uses your work across many posts.
• If you do something newsworthy that media companies, bloggers, and publications mention, they source it or feature you.

Unnatural:

• Provide feeds and databases to help you sell products on other sites linking to your site.
• Having bloggers or publishers create a store without “sponsored” or “nofollow” attributes on their links.
• Banner ads run of site, category, etc., because they are paid placements.
• Widgets, feeds, and badges that include keyword-rich backlinks.
• Widgets, feeds, badges that are clearly marketing ploys. And they don’t represent something unique or real.

These are just a few of the many examples.

Sometimes they can be considered spam, while other times, they might not.

It all depends on the link, your relationship with the website, and if they’re natural.

How important are backlinks in SEO?

SEO is 100% dependent on backlinks. But it is not a numbers game.

The quality of the links acquired plays a significant role, but before getting any links, begin ranking based upon site structure, quality content, and the way the page renders.

A search engine may use backlinks in SEO as one signal.

A search engine’s sole purpose is to provide a user with the most relevant results in the fastest possible format and the most accessible manner.

This could be a paragraph, list, video, image, or mixed media. This is just as important, if not more so, than backlinks.

Why Sites with fewer backlinks outrank sites with more

You need to understand what a link is to answer why a website with fewer links will rank higher than one with many.

Before smartphones, schema, and concepts like E-A-T, search engines needed a way to determine trust between a website’s pages and the website itself.

Backlinks were one of these trust factors, specifically PageRank with Google.

Now we have other options to build trust and authority for our website now that PageRank is no longer available (At least that’s what we remember back then).

You may be able to compete with other websites and webpages if your website and page meet these trust and authority signals.

• Trust can be built by having licensed, credible and trustworthy people sign off on your content. It does not make them credible or established just because they are your CEO. This is one of the most challenging things for executives to swallow.
• Use links and schema to source the content.
• Have a solid internal linking structure that provides more explanations for concepts or resources mentioned in your content.
• Ensure your website is secure.
• Give a clear explanation of the concept, make it easier to buy, or use better formatting that is easier for people to understand.

You can also:

• Be as ADA-compliant as possible (the more people that can access your content, the better the experience for everyone giving search engines a reason to show your page over another).
• Get lightning-fast load times for people with slow connections and mobile devices to access your content.
• Use these tips to structure your content correctly: Heading tags, Clear titles, Properly named images The formating of sections into tables, Lists, Paragraphs, etc
• Add proper schema to define what is on the page and in each section.
• Use proper site structure and make sure your most important pages are being referenced when it is natural.
• Check your Core Web Vitals now that search engines like Google are doubling down, including cumulative layout shift (CLS).

Quality backlinks can help you rank better than merit, but there are some things you can do to improve your chances of beating a webpage or website with 10X or 100X as many links.