Backlink

Websites are connected to each other through clickable references called links. A backlink is such a reference, viewed from the perspective of the page it points to. If a news portal links to a company’s website in an article, that company has received a backlink. In German, this is also called a Rückverweis or eingehender Link. For the linked page, this is more than a technical connection. It gains visitors who click the link, and it sends a signal to search engines.

Links as votes in ranking

Search engines have to decide, for every search query, which page should rank on top. The text on a page alone doesn’t help much with this, since anyone can claim to be an expert on a topic. Google had a better idea in the late 1990s. It counts who links to a page and treats every reference like a recommendation. This principle was called PageRank and was the core of Google’s early success.

Not all recommendations count equally, though. A link from a well-known university or a major newspaper carries more weight than one from an obscure blog. It can be compared to academic papers: a study that is frequently cited by renowned researchers is considered more important than one nobody mentions. Google applied exactly this logic to the web.

Because good rankings on Google translate directly into revenue, backlinks have become a commodity. There are companies that sell links, and networks that link to each other reciprocally. Search engines fight this, because such purchased recommendations distort the rankings. Anyone caught buying links can be penalized in the search results.

What makes a backreference strong or worthless

Search engines send programs across the web that fetch page after page and record all links. This creates a huge map of who references whom. From this map, the search engine calculates a kind of importance score for each page. Part of this score is passed on to the linked pages via the links.

Also important is the visible text of the link, known in the trade as anchor text. If it says “cheap running shoes,” this tells the search engine what the target page is about. The surrounding context also plays a role. A link in the middle of a relevant, topic-related article is more valuable than one in the footer of a page on an unrelated subject.

Site operators can also mark a link with a tag called “nofollow.” It roughly means: this reference is not a recommendation from me. Wikipedia and many comment sections use this so that link spam doesn’t pay off. A common misconception is that lots of backlinks are automatically good. Hundreds of links from worthless sites look suspicious and can do more harm than good.

Backlinks in SEO, the press, and AI answers

The term comes up mainly in connection with SEO, meaning search engine optimization. This refers to the work of moving a website up in the search results. A large part of this work consists of earning good backreferences. That’s why companies write guest posts, publish studies, or send out press releases.

As a reader, too, you encounter this topic without hearing the term. Labels like “advertisement” or “sponsored” on links in blog posts stem from this. Paid links must be marked as such, otherwise it counts as deceiving readers and search engines.

In tech news, the term backlink has appeared in a new discussion for a few years now. Chatbots and AI search engines answer questions directly instead of linking to websites. Publishers complain that this costs them visitors and references. Whether recommendations on the web will still run through classic links in the future has thus become an open question.