The whole webmaster community is trying to understand the importance of backlinks and many portray or pretend that they know a lot about the importance of backlinks in SEO and the same people have written tons of content on the internet about the assumptions they have made.

Making assumptions about backlink importance is completely fine but someone’s assumption or half knowledge is taking the world to nowhere, in fact, its waste of resource, waste of time, waste of effort and everything and moreover you are consoling yourself for the things which you cannot understand logically and technically and leading an unsatisfied webmaster life and doing all the wrong things throughout your life.

A simple survey was conducted and questioned few tens of experienced webmasters and SEO professionals regarding the importance of backlinks or the role of backlinks in SEO and they all gave the same kind of following answers,

1. Backlinks pass link juice to website
2. Backlinks from external websites increase domain authority and in turn website performs better on search engines
3. Backlinks refer our website to search engines and hence search engine start prioritizing our website on SERP
4. Backlinks are built to get a referral traffic to the website
5. Backlinks drive sales
6. Backlinks help people find our business on the internet
7. The number of backlinks a website has is in a good indicator of its popularity or importance with search engines.
8. Google, give more credit to websites that have a larger number of quality backlinks and consider those websites more relevant in a search query.
9. It is easy to get a higher ranking using backlinks than it is to influence search engines with external backlinks from other sites

in fact, even you would have heard the same from your seniors, a read on the internet or somebody must have mentioned the same to you.

It all sounds a nonsense to me as none of these are the valid explanations when someone is trying to understand the importance of backlinks in SEO.

I have few questions to those who have given the above statements about the backlink importance,

1. Backlinks pass link juice – What is this link juice? And how is it going to help a website perform on search engines? Or importance in SEO!
2. Backlinks from external websites increase domain authority and in turn website performs better on search engines- What is this domain authority and how it improve the performance of the website on search engines?
3. Backlinks refer our website to search engines and hence search engines start prioritizing our website on SERP – Complete non-sense, technically how do search engines care about this?
4. Backlinks are built to get referral traffic to the website- No, I completely disagree with this and my explanation further in the article with clearly you regarding this
5. Backlinks drive sales – Yes, that’s affiliate marketing, not a backlink
6. Backlinks help people find our business on the internet- yes when your website is a listing on a directory and this doesn’t help your website really perform on search engines especially when those backlinks are no-follow links
7. The number of backlinks a website has is in a good indicator of its popularity or importance with search engines. – Does really search engines give importance or consider a website to be popular regardless of the follow, do-follow, spam and credible links? There is nothing as good indicator or popularity. Please do not give a false information to the youth when can’t technically explain it.
8. Google, give more credit to websites that have a larger number of quality backlinks and consider those websites more relevant in a search query.- What kind of credit is it and how is it helping websites perform on search engines? What is quality backlink? I am sure the person who wrote this may tell a domain that has high DA is a quality website and link from it is a quality backlink. But then, what is this DA? Does the scale of backlinks really matter?
9. It is easy to get a higher ranking using backlinks than it is to influence search engines with external backlinks from other sites – As per this persons, understanding backlinks and external backlinks are different. Backlinks are considered as internal links and are telling internal links are enough to help websites perform on search engines, maybe when the website itself if highly credible ( let me speak in the language what all these webmasters have used, I will be providing the actual term instead of this credible term). The knowledge is outdated or it’s a half-baked cake.

I am sorry for being rude, but they not being to the point and despite providing a vague information doesn’t help anybody.

I just don’t want to make you wait, I will tell you the role or importance of the backlinks in SEO.

Backlinks' one & only main purpose or objective is to improve the crawl frequency of the website. Yes, what you have heard is correct and that’s the importance of backlinks.

If you are wondering in knowing what is this crawl frequency kindly go through the below articles, which help you in understanding the SEO at a different level and also addresses many of your unanswered doubts.

• Everything about off-page
• How Websites Rank up on top of Google despite so many similar players

Hope the above two articles help you in finding the importance of link building, even after going through the articles if you are struggling to figure out how off-page or backlinks play the role in SEO please comment on this article or get in touch with me at kandradigital@gmail.com

Alternatively, you can also reach me at 9036998154 for any explanation or doubts regarding this.

I am helping several business owners and digital marketing professionals to find answers to their unanswered questions, building strategies, setting up the tracking, measuring the ROI’s and more.

Manjunath Chowdary

Digital Marketing Expert, consultant, Mentor and
Director of KandraDigital Marketing
Solutions Pvt Ltd.