Short answer: What are backlinks? They are simply links on other websites that point to pages on yours — the “back” is that they link back to you. Search engines treat a link from a relevant, trusted site as a vote: someone with their own reputation considered your page worth sending their readers to. A handful of honest votes from real local and industry sites is worth more than thousands of bought ones, and you earn them the slow way — by being listed where customers already look, being mentioned where your work is talked about, and publishing pages worth linking to.
Backlinks, in the everyday sense
Imagine two bakeries on the same street. One is mentioned in the neighbourhood association’s newsletter, written up in the local paper’s food column, and listed on the farmers’ market’s website with a link to her menu. The other is known to nobody outside her own sign. A newcomer deciding where to buy bread follows the mentions. Google works the same way at internet scale: when a site links to yours, it passes a little of its own credibility along with the click. That is the whole idea behind what are backlinks — not a technical trick, just references, counted by a machine. Google’s own SEO Starter Guide describes links as the way people and search engines discover and judge pages, which is exactly how an owner should think of them.
Not all votes count the same
A link’s weight depends on who casts it. A link from your city’s chamber of commerce, a trade association you belong to, or a local newspaper story carries real weight: those sites are trusted, local, and hard to get listed on without being a genuine business. A link from a random blog on another continent, in an unrelated trade, surrounded by links to casinos and loan sites, carries none — and a pattern of those can make your site look manipulative rather than recommended. Relevance matters as much as authority: a plumbing supplier linking to a plumber is a natural reference; the same supplier linking to a wedding planner is not. Quality, relevance, and honesty are the three tests, and a link should pass all three before you welcome it.
The links a local business should actually have
Most of a small firm’s honest backlinks come from the listings it should hold anyway. Your chamber of commerce and local business associations. The trade bodies and certification programs you genuinely belong to. Suppliers and brands whose dealer or installer locators list you. The charities, teams, and events you actually sponsor. Local press when something real happens — an opening, an anniversary, an award, a community project. Each of these is a link a human can explain in one sentence, which is precisely the standard: if you cannot say, out loud, why that site links to you, the link is probably not one you want. Claiming these listings has a second benefit — consistent name, address, and phone details across them reinforce the local profile work in our Toronto local SEO checklist.
Earning links with pages worth linking to
The second honest source is your own content. Pages get linked when they are the best answer someone can point to: a clear local cost guide, an honest checklist, a useful explanation in a trade publication or a community forum. This is why the guides in a series like ours link to each other and occasionally get cited elsewhere — each one answers a question completely enough to be worth referencing, which is the standard our on-page SEO checklist is built around. You cannot schedule this kind of link, and that is the point: it arrives because the page earned it, and it tends to keep working for years, unlike a paid placement that vanishes when the invoice stops.
What are backlinks worth avoiding? The bought and the traded
The offers arrive weekly: hundreds of links for a flat fee, placements on “high-authority” sites you have never heard of, exchanges with businesses in unrelated trades in other countries. Decline all of them. At best they do nothing — search engines are practiced at ignoring link schemes. At worst, a pattern of manipulative links earns a penalty or a quiet loss of trust that takes months of cleanup to undo, usually just as the site was starting to work. The same rule applies to writing reviews or testimonials you did not earn and to comment-section link dropping under articles. Our guide to Google reviews and SEO makes the parallel point about reviews: anything that counterfeits trust risks the asset the trust is stored in. Backlinks are that asset in link form.
How many do you need, and how do you check?
There is no target number, because the comparison is local: you need a link profile that looks like a real, established business in your market beside your competitors’ — for most local firms that means the chamber, the associations, the suppliers, the press mentions, and a slow accumulation of earned references, which typically totals in the dozens, not the thousands. You can see who links to you in Google Search Console’s Links report, free with your site verified, and it is worth a look twice a year: check that the expected listings are there, and that nothing strange has attached itself. Whether the whole system is moving is a matter of months, as our guide on how long SEO takes lays out — links are the slow half of SEO, and also the half that lasts.
Where backlinks sit in the whole job
Links are the off-page half of search visibility: the profile and reviews locally, the links everywhere. They cannot rescue a site whose pages do not answer questions, and strong pages with no references usually plateau below weaker pages that the world keeps citing. The order of work we recommend is the order this series is written in: pages first, profile and reviews next, then the listings and mentions that become your backlinks — with our SEO pricing and services overview showing what it looks like to have the sequence run for you.
Frequently asked questions
Do backlinks still matter in 2026?
Yes — they remain one of the clearest signals of whether the wider web considers a page worth recommending, alongside the quality of the page itself. What has changed is tolerance: engines have become very good at ignoring or discounting manufactured links, so the honest minority of links carries more relative weight than it used to. Real references, from real organizations, about real work — those still move rankings.
Can I just buy backlinks to speed things up?
No — bought links are the single most reliable way to turn a growing site into a cleanup project. The cheap networks are known, the placements are irrelevant, and the pattern is visible in your link profile to anyone, including Google, who looks. The money buys risk, not ranking. Spend the same budget on one genuinely useful page or on claiming the listings you already qualify for.
What is the difference between a backlink and an internal link?
An internal link connects two pages on your own site — important for navigation and for showing Google which of your pages matter, and fully in your control. A backlink comes from someone else’s site, which is why it counts as a vote: you cannot cast it yourself. Both belong in a healthy site; only backlinks carry the outside-world credibility signal.
How do I ask another site to link to me?
Ask only where a real relationship or a genuine listing already exists: the association you joined, the supplier whose products you install, the event you sponsored, the journalist who covered your opening. Send the exact page the link should point to and one sentence on why their readers benefit. Never offer payment, a reciprocal link as the reason, or scripted wording — the request should survive being read aloud.
A competitor has far more links than me. Can I catch up?
Usually, yes — because most local competitors’ counts are padded with the same low-value listings everyone has, and the links that actually separate firms are few: press, associations, suppliers, and a couple of genuinely cited pages. You do not need more links than them; you need the links that pass the three tests — quality, relevance, honesty — and pages good enough to keep earning them.
Build the references a real business earns
Claim the listings you qualify for, keep the details consistent, publish pages worth pointing to, and let the links accumulate the way your reputation did — one real mention at a time. That is the complete answer to what are backlinks and the only method that has never been penalized. If you would like us to audit who links to you today and which listings you are missing, Get a Free Quote and tell us your trade and your city. We will show you the gaps against your closest competitors and what we would claim or build first.