Are backlinks still important for SEO?
Yes — a link from another site is still one of the clearest trust signals a search engine has: an independent site is vouching for yours. Content and technical SEO determine whether you're able to rank; backlinks are a big part of what determines whether you actually outrank the sites already sitting above you for a given keyword.
The reason this trips people up is that backlink advice hasn't kept pace with how spammy the old tactics became. Directory submissions, link farms, and PBNs used to work; today they're more likely to get a domain penalized than to help it. What still works looks a lot more like actual outreach and actual usefulness.
What makes a backlink valuable
Not all links carry equal weight. Before spending time chasing any one link, it's worth checking:
- Relevance — a link from a site in your niche or adjacent to it counts for far more than a link from an unrelated site, regardless of that site's own authority
- Authority of the linking domain — higher domain rating passes more trust, but relevance matters more than raw authority
- Follow vs. nofollow — nofollow links don't pass ranking authority directly, but they still drive referral traffic and brand visibility, so they're not worthless
- Placement — a link in the body of an article, surrounded by relevant content, is worth more than one buried in a footer or sidebar
Ways to actually earn links
Create something worth linking to. Original data, tools, templates, or genuinely useful guides get linked to naturally because people reference them instead of re-explaining the same thing. This is the slowest option to set up but the one that keeps earning links with no ongoing effort.
Fix unlinked mentions. Search for your brand name without your URL attached — sites that mention you but forgot to link are usually a quick, friendly email away from an easy link.
Guest posting, done selectively. Writing for other sites in your niche still works, but the era of guest posting purely for the link is over — target sites with a real, engaged audience, and write something genuinely useful to their readers, not a thinly disguised ad.
Resource and roundup pages. Many niches have pages explicitly listing tools or resources ("Best X tools," "SEO resources for Y"). If you have a genuinely useful, free tool or guide, these pages are often open to additions on request.
Replace broken links. Find dead links on relevant sites (pointing to pages that 404 now) and suggest your content as the replacement. It's low-effort for the site owner to fix, which makes it one of the higher response-rate outreach approaches.
What to avoid
- Buying links in bulk from marketplaces — search engines are increasingly good at detecting unnatural link patterns, and the downside (a manual action) is far worse than the upside
- Reciprocal link exchanges at scale ("link to me and I'll link to you") beyond a handful of genuine, relevant partnerships
- Comment spam and low-quality directory submissions — these carry essentially no authority today and can flag a domain as low-quality
How to prioritize your first efforts
If you're starting from close to zero backlinks, the highest-leverage order is usually: fix unlinked brand mentions first (fastest, easiest), then build one genuinely useful asset (tool, data page, or comprehensive guide), then use that asset as the centerpiece of outreach to relevant sites in your niche. Chasing links one email at a time before you have something worth linking to is the slowest path to real authority.
Track whether it's working
Link building is slow, so it's easy to lose track of whether effort is translating into results. Check your domain rating periodically to see whether your authority score is actually climbing as you build links — rather than relying on rankings alone, which move on a longer delay and are affected by more than just your backlink profile.