What Are Backlinks? The 5 Levels of Link Building

Backlinks are one of the most common topics we get asked about as an agency, and for good reason. They’re crucial for SEO. If you’ve been trying to improve your website’s SEO, chances are you’ve come across the term “backlinks” or “backlinking.” But what exactly are backlinks, and why do they matter so much?

We understand that backlinks can sometimes be a difficult concept to grasp as a newbie, so that’s why we wrote this blog to simplify it!

Backlinks are a fundamental part of any SEO strategy. Choosing the right keywords, fixing technical issues and writing great content all play their part in your overall SEO effort, but backlinks should never be ignored. In fact, in 2016 Google revealed that link building is one of the top three factors when it comes to search rankings.

Essentially, the aim of backlinks is to boost your site’s authority by reaching out to other similar websites to refer back to yours.

Are you ready to make that change and boost your website? Then keep reading!

What are backlinks?

At their core, backlinks are links from other websites that point back to your own. Think of them as virtual word-of-mouth recommendations. They’re also called inbound links because they bring external traffic to your site. These links can come from various sources like blogs, news articles, or even other businesses sharing your content.

Backlinks help search engines like Google and Bing understand how popular and trustworthy your website is. Essentially, the more quality backlinks you have, the more search engines view your site as valuable. This directly impacts your rankings in search engine results pages (SERPs), making backlinks a key element in any successful SEO strategy.

Why backlinks still decide who gets found

In the past, the sheer number of backlinks determined how high a website would rank. But in 2012, Google’s Penguin update changed that, shifting the focus from quantity to quality. Backlinks are still essential, but the game has changed. High-quality, relevant backlinks from reputable sites carry much more weight.

When another site links to yours, it passes “link juice,” a kind of SEO value. How much value a link passes depends on the authority of the site linking to you and how relevant that site is to yours.

Across the internet, websites are given a domain authority score, which ranges between 1 and 100 (100 being the highest). This score is calculated based on multiple factors, one of them being how strong your backlink profile is.

If you want to check the authority of a website, tools like MozBar (a free Chrome extension) can give you an idea of how much value a backlink from a particular site will carry.

Backlinks are a vote of confidence for your website, helping search engines find and rank your site, improve its domain authority, and even drive traffic.

Boost Search Engine Visibility

Backlinks help search engines like Google discover your site. They act as signposts, showing search engines where to find your pages and signalling that your content is valuable. The more high-quality backlinks you have, the easier it is for search engines to find and index your site.

Increase Domain Authority

Google wants to rank sites that are trustworthy and authoritative. A strong backlink profile sends a signal to search engines that your content is worth promoting. Quality counts for more than the number of backlinks. A few high-quality backlinks can do more for your SEO than hundreds of low-quality ones.

Drive More Traffic to Your Site

Backlinks from reputable sites not only boost your SEO but also bring more direct traffic. The more people who visit your site from these links, the higher the chances that some of them will convert into paying customers or loyal readers.

The one rule that decides if a backlink is any good

A link is not good because the site is big. It is good because the site is relevant and real people actually visit it.

That sounds obvious and almost nobody works this way. Most link building is sorted by domain authority score, highest first, because that is what the tools sort by. A relevant publication in your industry that sends you three real customers a month beats a giant news site that sends you nobody.

Relevance is the first filter, not the second. A link from a site in your industry carries more weight than one from a site in an unrelated field, and that is true even when the unrelated site has the bigger number next to it.

How many backlinks do you actually need?

Fewer than you think. Sometimes twenty. Sometimes one.

The number is the wrong question because backlinks are not counted, they are weighed. Page A with 1,000 links from low quality sites can sit below Page B with 10 links from trusted, relevant ones.

A more useful question is how long they take. From a link going live, expect two to three months before you would attribute a ranking movement to it. Anyone promising faster than that is either selling something or measuring something else.

The five levels of link building

Link building goes from things anyone can do today to things that take a year to earn. These are the five levels, in order.

Level 1: Claim

Links that already exist for you, unclaimed. Google Business Profile, Bing Places, Apple Business, Yelp, Yellow Pages, your industry associations, your local chamber of commerce. These will not shoot you up the rankings on their own. They are how Google and AI first learn you exist. Most businesses already have some of these and they are out of date or half filled in.

Level 2: Ask

Links from people who already know you. Suppliers with a stockists page. The club you sponsor. The association you pay fees to. Podcasts and industry events, which pay twice because you get the link and the audience from the same effort. And the one almost nobody does: if other sites are using your original photos without credit, find them and ask for the credit link. Write down ten organisations that already know your business and ask all ten.

Level 3: Steal

The links your competitors already have. Scan their backlink profile, find broken links the publisher has not updated and articles that have gone out of date, then make a better version and tell the publisher. Before you email anyone, thirty seconds of checks: does the site get real traffic, does it rank for anything, is it indexed, has its traffic fallen off a cliff. If it fails those, the link is not worth having.

The same approach works on your own profile. We’ve written a separate guide to reclaiming links you have lost, and one on building links for an online store if you run an eCommerce site.

Level 4: Authorship

Your words earn the link. Guest posting works and it compounds, but be honest about the cost: it only compounds if you keep showing up. Three ways to find sites that take guest posts. Search your industry keyword plus “write for us”. Follow the consultants who publish everywhere in your niche and look at where their articles appear. Or put a competitor’s domain into Ahrefs or Semrush and look for links sitting in author bios.

The top of this level is when you stop pitching and publications start asking you.

Level 5: Attract

Digital PR. You stop hunting links one at a time and publish something newsworthy enough that journalists link to you in batches. One good story can earn more links in a week than the four levels below it earn in a year. It needs something real to talk about: data, a story, or a genuinely useful take on a live trend.

Good vs bad backlinks

Not all backlinks are created equal. A backlink from a low-authority, irrelevant site isn’t going to help much, and in some cases, it can even hurt your rankings. For example, spamming your URL across random forums or low-quality sites won’t do you any favours.

Good backlinks, on the other hand, come from trusted, relevant sites.

These could be from a mention in a national newspaper, a link from your Google Business Profile, or a feature on a popular blog in your industry.

High-quality backlinks improve both your SEO and your website’s credibility.

Should you buy backlinks?

Yes, some of them, and this is where most agencies go quiet.

Paid placement is a normal part of link building. The question is not whether money changes hands, it is what the money is buying. If you are paying for an audience and an association with a publication that real people read, that is advertising and it is fine. If you are paying purely for the link, on a site nobody visits, that is the thing Google is looking for.

The price tells you which one you are buying. Anything under about 20 US dollars is rubbish, without exception. A real placement on a site with genuine organic traffic typically runs from about 100 to 500 US dollars, and premium publications ask 1,000 or more.

Before paying anyone, check the site has real organic traffic in Ahrefs or Semrush, check real people are reading it, and check it is relevant to your industry. Google expects paid placements to be marked as sponsored, so know that a sponsored link is bought for the audience, not for the ranking.

If you have already bought a cheap package: do not buy another. See the section on when link building is not working below.

Understanding backlink authority

When Google launched, its groundbreaking PageRank algorithm revolutionised how websites were ranked. It was one of the first search engines to factor in backlink popularity, meaning a page would rank higher based on the number of backlinks it had. However, it’s no longer just about quantity. Google now places significant weight on the authority of those backlinks.

Let’s break it down with a simple example:

• Page A has 1000 backlinks
• Page B has 10 backlinks

In theory, Page A should rank higher because it has more backlinks. But authority changes the equation.

If Page A’s backlinks come from low-quality or irrelevant sites, while Page B’s backlinks are from highly trusted, authoritative sources, Page B could easily outrank Page A.

This is why the quality of backlinks often matters more than the quantity.

PageRank assigns authority based on the number and strength of incoming links, meaning high-quality links from trusted domains carry more weight.

So, a single link from a well-known, reputable site can boost your authority more than dozens of links from lower-quality websites.

The different types of backlinks

Not all backlinks are the same. Here are the main types you’ll come across:

• Dofollow Links
  These are the most valuable backlinks because they pass on the most link juice, directly boosting your SEO. When you think of a traditional backlink, this is the one that comes to mind.
• Nofollow Links
  While these links still direct traffic to your site, they don’t pass as much link juice as dofollow links. Google will see the link but won’t necessarily use it to boost your ranking.
• UGC (User-Generated Content) Links
  These links appear in user-generated content, like comments or forum posts. They’re often flagged as user-created, meaning the website owner isn’t necessarily endorsing them.
• Sponsored Links
  A sponsored link indicates that a link is part of an advertisement, telling Google not to pass SEO value to the site it’s linking to.

The words a link sits on matter too. Here’s how anchor text changes what a link is worth.

How to check your backlinks for free

You can do most of a backlink review in Google Search Console before paying for anything.

Find your page two opportunities by sorting queries on average position. Anything sitting between 11 and 20 is close.

Find long tail queries with impressions and no clicks. Those are usually good FAQ entries or simple blog pages you have not written yet.

Check whether your non branded traffic is going up or down. Branded traffic moving tells you about your marketing. Non branded tells you about your SEO.

If performance is down, narrow it to which page types or subfolders are causing it before you touch anything. A site-wide drop and one section bleeding look identical until you split them.

When you do pay for a tool, Ahrefs or Semrush will both get you there. Pick whichever you find answers in faster.

When link building is not working

The most common message we get is that links have been built and rankings have not moved. It is almost never the links.

Check these in order.

Is all the content on the page actually visible to a bot? A page can look complete in a browser and be half empty to a crawler.

Are there enough internal links from your money pages pointing at it? A page nothing links to internally is a page you have told Google not to care about.

If the page is new, does it rank for anything at all in the top 100? If not, that is a big red flag and no amount of links will fix it.

Do the pages ranking above you even have links pointing at them? Sometimes they do not, which means links were never the deciding factor for that query.

If a page is being genuinely stubborn, run a small Google Ads campaign at it and see if anything changes. It is a cheap way to find out whether the page converts at all before spending more on earning links to it.

On toxic links and disavowing

Disavow only if you have received a manual penalty action in Search Console, or your site has been hacked. Google is smart enough to recognise the spammy links every site picks up just from being on the web. That is our position, and plenty of good SEOs take a more aggressive disavow approach, so it is worth knowing this is a judgement call rather than a rule.

If you do get a manual action for unnatural links, budget around three months to clear it, from submission to resolution.

Frequently asked questions

Are paid backlinks worth it?

Some are. Anything under about 20 US dollars is rubbish. A real placement on a site with genuine organic traffic runs from about 100 to 500 US dollars, and you are paying for the audience and the association rather than the ranking.

How many backlinks do I need to rank on page one?

There is no number. Ten links from trusted, relevant sites can outrank a thousand from low quality ones. Sometimes twenty is enough and sometimes one is.

How long do backlinks take to work?

Two to three months from the link going live before you would attribute a ranking movement to it.

Should I remove or disavow bad backlinks?

Only if you have a manual penalty action in Search Console or your site has been hacked. Otherwise leave them. Google recognises the spam every site picks up.

Are cheap Fiverr backlink gigs safe?

No. Anything under about 20 US dollars is not worth having. If you have already bought a package, do not buy another.

Do backlinks still matter for AI search?

Yes. AI search leans on the same signals about who the web vouches for. We have not seen links behave differently since AI Overviews arrived, and we are not claiming to have measured it.

How we can help

Building a strong backlink profile takes time, and working out which of the five levels to start with is half the job. If you’d rather hand it to specialists, our link building team can look at where your site sits today and build links that earn their place.

Get in touch with us today, and let’s see how we can help boost your SEO!