Learn · SEO
A backlink is a link from another website to yours. Search engines treat them like recommendations: a link from a respected, relevant site is a vote of confidence that lifts your credibility. Quality matters far more than quantity. A few links from trusted sources beat hundreds of junk ones.
Good links are earned, not bought. You get them by publishing something worth citing, being genuinely useful, getting covered in the press, or being listed in real directories. Paid link schemes and link farms violate Google's guidelines and can get a site penalized.
Relevance counts too. A link from a site in your field carries more weight than one from an unrelated page, because it signals that people who know your subject vouch for you.
Updated July 2026
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Search engines rank pages on relevance to the query, the quality and depth of the content, how trustworthy the site looks (partly from links and mentions elsewhere), and the experience of the page itself, including speed and mobile usability. No single factor decides it. Google weighs hundreds of signals together.
On-page SEO is everything you control on your own site: the content, titles, headings, internal links, structured data, and page speed. Off-page SEO is what happens elsewhere, mainly backlinks and mentions from other sites, which build your reputation. You need both.
E-E-A-T stands for Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness. It's the framework Google's human quality raters use to judge content, and while it isn't a direct score in the algorithm, Google builds signals that approximate it. It matters most for topics that affect health, money, or safety.