A backlink is a hyperlink on one website that points to a page on another website. Search engines count backlinks as one signal of how much weight a page carries, and search engine optimization (SEO) work tries to earn them.
History of Backlinks
Creator: No single creator. The link ranking method is linked to PageRank by Larry Page and Sergey Brin, 1998. Year: 1998.
A backlink is a hyperlink on one web resource that points to another web resource. The term is named from the point of view of the target page, which receives the link. Other names for a backlink are incoming link, inbound link, inlink and citation. Links that stay inside the same site are internal links, and links to other sites are outbound links.
Search engines use the number, the quality and the relevance of backlinks to estimate how much weight a page carries. The PageRank algorithm scores each page from how all the pages connect to each other. Stanford University students Larry Page and Sergey Brin developed it in 1998 in the Backrub search engine, and Google uses a form of it to order search results.
Google's description of PageRank from January 1998 says that a link from page A to page B is a vote, by page A, for page B. The method is like the citation analysis used for books, scholarly papers and academic journals. A topical version of PageRank gives more weight to backlinks from pages on the same topic as the target page.
Once the value of links was known, many site owners tried to place as many inbound links as they could, whatever the context of the linking site. This practice is called link spam. Some owners bought links through private blog networks.
Google released Penguin 4.0 on 23 September 2016. Penguin then ran in real time within the core search algorithm. Google says that paid links are allowed when they carry a rel="nofollow" or rel="sponsored" attribute.
Methods that site owners use to earn links include blog commenting, guest blogging, article submission, press release distribution, social media engagement and forum posting. Linkbaiting, which means creating content that other sites want to link to, needs planning and marketing. Each method has a different cost in time and money.
Changelog and latest update
Google released Penguin 4.0 on 23 September 2016. The current rules are on Google's spam policies page, which lists examples of link spam and states that Google can take manual action against sites that break them.
Google's spam policies page lists buying or selling links for ranking purposes as the first example of link spam. The page also lists other forms of link manipulation. Site owners who break these rules can receive a manual action from Google, which can reduce how the site appears in results.
Google's guide to crawlable links explains how Google reads the links in a page. The guide was last updated on 10 December 2025. It states that links need a real href attribute so that Google can follow them, and it describes how Google uses those links to find and rank pages.
Latest update: Google spam policies: link spam, 2026-08-28
The Google spam policies page was last updated on 28 August 2026. The page defines link spam as creating links to or from a site primarily to manipulate search rankings. It lists buying or selling links for ranking purposes as the first example. A site that breaks the rules can receive a manual action. The page is the current reference for the rules that apply to backlinks in Google Search.
Usage examples
A backlink is an ordinary HTML link on a page of another site. The examples below show a normal link in page text, a link that carries a nofollow and sponsored value, and a command that counts the referring sites in a web server log. The first two examples are written by the linking site, and the third is run by the site that receives the links.
<p>
Read our guide on
<a href="https://ex.co/seo/">
search engine optimization</a>.
</p>This paragraph holds a link from the linking site to the page at ex.co. The target page receives this link as a backlink. The anchor text describes the topic of the target page, which helps readers and search engines understand the link.
<a href="https://ex.co/"
rel="nofollow sponsored">Partner</a>The rel attribute tells search engines how to treat a link. The nofollow value asks search engines not to pass ranking credit, and sponsored marks a paid or affiliate link. Site owners use these values on links that they do not want to count as editorial votes.
awk '{print $11}' access.log \
| sort | uniq -c | sort -rn | headThe Apache combined log format stores the referrer in the eleventh field. This pipeline counts the referrer values and lists the most frequent sources first. Each source is a page that sent visitors to the site, which shows the sites that link to it.
References
These sources are outside Websnoogie and were checked on 2026-10-12.
Backlink
Wikipedia
Encyclopedia article on backlinks. It covers the definition, the other names for a backlink, the role of PageRank in ranking, the link spam history and the methods that site owners use to earn links.
Spam Policies for Google Web Search
Google Search Central
Google's rules on link spam and other spam practices. The page lists buying or selling links for ranking purposes and gives the last update date, 28 August 2026, used on this page.
Link Best Practices for Google
Google Search Central
Google's guide to links that search engines can follow. It describes the href attribute, the anchor text and the way Google uses links to discover pages and to understand their topics. The guide is written for site owners and developers who want search engines to find every page.
Google Search Central Updates
Google Search Central
The dated list of changes to Google Search documentation, including changes to the spam and link guidance. It is the place where Google records each documentation update, with its date. The list also shows the date of each change, so a reader can see when the link guidance last moved.
Bing Webmaster Guidelines
Microsoft Learn
Microsoft's documentation for Bing Webmaster Tools. It describes how Bing treats links to a site and gives site owners the reports they use to check the inbound links that Bing has found. It also describes how Bing reads the links that point to a site and how site owners can review them in the tools.
Quality links or a big number of links
A backlink is a link from another site to yours. There are two ways to get them. The first way is to earn links by making a page that others want to cite. The second way is to buy or trade links in bulk. The first way takes time, but it lasts longer. The second way can invite a penalty from search engines. We explain the difference in plain words before any work starts.
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