Author: Ryan Walsh
Date: 13/06/2025
Are backlinks still an essential part of the SEO process?
When you think of all of the millions of businesses out there, how does Google choose which businesses are the most important?
How does Google decipher which companies occupy the number 1 spot or position 100?
Well, one way is using backlinks, as most SEO agencies describe these as a vote of confidence in your business.
Can you create a diagram: alt text, use a flow diagram to explain all the different ways good quality links can help to improve a company’s SEO.
Backlinks can:
– Help improve a business’s domain authority
– Help improve the number of visitors
– Help a business to rank higher on Google.
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There might be over 1,000 businesses that sell toasters, for example, yet often the websites that rank at the top of Google for “toasters” will be those with a strong backlink profile. Therefore, when you place these domains say in Ahrefs or Moz Pro, you will see often they will have thousands of quality links.
Therefore, to move above the competition, you need to have more backlinks.
This means it doesn’t matter which business sector you are in; if you want more visibility, which means ranking higher on Google, you need more links.
Good links, powerful links are hard to come by, which is why it’s hard for businesses to get and reach the top organic positions on Google. This is also why top agencies, such as marketing agencies, can spend thousands of hours building links for their clients.
What is a backlink?
Backlinks, in theory, are not complicated; they are simply one website linking to another.
For example, two businesses may sell services that complement each other; for instance, one is an airline, and the other sells rental cars.
Therefore, they link to each other, businesses have a commercial connection, promoting each other they often link together using backlinks.
From an SEO perspective, backlinks are essential because “Googlebot” crawls and indexes them.
Once indexed, when a business has built a new link, which is then added to the business’s backlink profile. Therefore, businesses will need to build many good quality links if they want to improve their SEO.
Here’s the critical part: if a business has a lot of links from important companies, Google will believe that it’s an important business as well.
If the business has a large number of links from unimportant websites, such as spam links, Google will most likely deem that website as spam and insignificant as well.
This is why businesses, especially global brands, that take their SEO seriously are careful about where they get links from. Yet all businesses should ensure the only links they obtain are quality.
Good links simply equal and equate to higher rankings on Google.
On the other hand, low-quality spam links dilute the power of a company’s search engine optimisation, at worst, can signal that the business is not following Google’s optimisation rules, resulting in some businesses getting deindexed.
How can businesses obtain these backlinks?
Earning backlinks
There’s only one real way of building links, that is, to work with your copywriters and publishers within your company to offer top-quality and helpful advice.
Quite simply put, when you help people to solve problems, whether that’s choosing the right washing machine for their needs, or how to solve split ends with their hair, this is when your business gets mentioned and linked to more by bloggers and other businesses.
Is this a fast process?
No, most certainly not. It’s similar to when someone starts a brand-new YouTube channel; it takes time to accumulate a larger audience and regular viewers.
This is also true for businesses marketing themselves, in terms of their SEO. It can mean publishing a lot of content marketing before you gain links. However, if the work is superior, in that you are offering better advice than the competition, then you start to get linked to.
Outreach
In theory, we all know that publishing content marketing today can take a long time before other businesses choose to link to you. This is why many agencies conduct link building outreach.
Outreach works by examining your direct competitors’ backlink profiles or identifying other link-building opportunities, and then contacting the business directly.
If this is conducted via email, it is sometimes brushed aside. Therefore, a more proactive approach, such as making phone calls or contacting key staff members on LinkedIn, is likely to be more effective.
However, do remember that the business often needs a reason to link to you. Therefore, if you sell a product that the other company does not, yet the two products complement each other, you could write a piece of content marketing for each of the websites.
For example, one company may sell pressure washers to the trade, while another company may manufacture car care products such as washes and waxes. A piece of content marketing that promotes each company’s services and products, with links pointing to each supplier’s website, could be effective if completed in a white hat way.
Don’t buy links
So, in 2025, we live in an era where A.I (Artificial Intelligence) has a good understanding of your company. Backlinks help improve authority; however, you shouldn’t solely focus on links as being the main driver to getting your business ranking in the top spot on Google.
Therefore, don’t go crazy with link building.
Instead, take your time to earn links.
Alternatively, you can conduct outreach to high-quality websites with a high DA score, and see if you can build links that way.
Don’t buy links.
Buying links is a major no-no when it comes to improving a company’s search engine optimisation, as it blatantly tries to make your businesses SEO appear more important than it is, without offering any value to a shopper. A shopper, therefore, doesn’t want to visit a website, a link farm with 10,000+ outbound links pointing to all types of businesses.
However, if they read an article that’s helpful, useful, and aids their buying decision, then they follow the link. In this case, the link has helped them buy the product or service they want.
Therefore, don’t buy links; only build quality links.
Don’t dilute your business’s backlink profile.
So, we do live in a world where more is perceived as better
However, more backlinks don’t automatically mean better.
What can sometimes happen is that a business gets, say, 10 amazing backlinks; these are so powerful that they move up Google’s ranks pretty quickly. Lets say the business is linked to by BBC, The Guardian and also The Sun newspaper, which helps improve the SEO. Lets say they are covering a story on a business award you have won.
What can sometimes happen is some businesses build good links, see the benefit, yet then get carried away. Then they may make the big mistake of building spam links.
However, some businesses may then go overboard with link-building, believing that more is better, when it’s not always the case. What can happen is that you start to dilute your existing backlink profile, thereby watering down the effectiveness of the links you already have.
So, if you have a client or a marketing manager breathing down your neck, saying I want X amount of links built by the end of the month, well, say Walsh & Partners said that’s not the way to go.
Quality is always better than quantity.
It’s better to have fewer high-quality links than to build low-quality links constantly. Remember that low-quality links can dilute your business’s backlink profile.
What’s the difference between follow vs no-follow links?
Businesses can choose whether to offer a link that passes link equity or not when providing a link. This is known as link juice. Therefore, businesses can decide if the link is do-follow or no-follow. To move a business up Google’s organic ranks, you will need do-follow links.
However, as we will mention later on, some no-follow links are needed as well.
Do-follow means the link juice can flow through to another website. For example, the BBC has a very high domain authority (DA) score. This means that if a link from the BBC links to you, it can pass link equity (link juice) which flows to your website and therefore improves the search engine optimisation of other companies.
So, what’s the benefit of no-follow links?
Well, the best SEO minds globally believe it’s also a good idea to have some no-follow links within your company’s backlink profile. Even though no-follow links won’t pass link juice, what they can do is make the backlink profile look more genuine.
What we mean by that is, if a business has 1,000 links in total, all of them are do-follow, it can mean the backlink profile appears to have been bought and therefore could be considered spam.
It’s far better to have a mixture of businesses linking to you which choose to offer a mix of do-follow and no-follow links.
A backlink profile, therefore, that includes both do-follow and no-follow links can appear more like the business has earned the links.
The last thing the company wants to do is make the links appear as if they have been purchased.
Spam links (why you should avoid building low-quality links)
We mentioned this earlier; however, it’s worth revisiting. That is, a business should not purchase or build spam links.
Many businesses often face one or more direct competitors with a large number of backlinks.
For example, you may have a direct competitor that has over 1,000 links, some businesses then fall into the trap of believing that it’s a race to build as many links as possible for their own company. However, spam links or low-quality links can trigger a link penalty (Google Penguin).
Link relevancy
Link relevancy is also essential; it makes building links more challenging, but it must still be adhered to. For example, the two businesses that link to each other need to be relevant. If you sell car care products for classic cars, you could link or gain a link from a classic car dealership, as the two are relevant.
However, if a rugby club links to a solicitor’s practice, well, the two businesses are not relevant. Therefore, SEO consultants believe it’s better to build relevant links from relevant businesses, as this is what improves the company’s SEO the most.
Anchor text is often underlined, made bold or a different colour from the rest of the text. The anchor text describes the page to which it is linked. For example, if the page sells Nike running trainers, then you should label the anchor text accordingly.
This helps not only the shopper, who knows what the link is about, but also Google’s search engine bot.
Why you should over-optimise the anchor text
Back in the days of Google’s PageRank, now we are talking about decades ago, businesses did over-optimise their anchor text. For example, if they wrote “best carpet shop in Cardiff” into the anchor text, then they could often rank higher on Google for that term. However, as of 2025, these SEO methods are outdated and no longer effective, which can potentially damage your SEO.
It’s now all about making sure that the anchor text is written more naturally, so that it describes the page you are linking to.