How important are backlinks?

Ask Me Anything Q&A SEO Office Hours Repo
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How do we ask other sites to put our links on their website?

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To answer your first question (“How important are backlinks?”), I’d say that the importance of backlinks depends upon which sites you are competing against in search results. Generally speaking, if they have a lot of backlinks then you will also need a lot of backlinks unless your site is significantly better at satisfying user intent, in which case you might be able to get by with fewer links, but usually that’s an uphill battle.

For your second question re: how to get links, that’s a very, very tricky question. There are lots of ways. And the ways that are most useful for your your site may look very different than the ways that are useful for another site. It’s highly industry and content dependent.

To that end, I’d read a bunch of link building tactic lists and see what works for you:

Keep in mind:

  1. The best links are from pages/sites that Google sends traffic to (and are relevant to your site’s niche).

  2. If a link is easy to get, it’s likely not very useful for sending ranking signals.