Backlinks, what they are for, how they evolved and how to earn them effectively

When I started with SEO years ago, link building worked in a surprisingly crude way. On the other hand, the relationship between the links you earned and your rankings was very direct. You put your website into twenty directories or content sites, bought a few so-called PR articles, and Google took it as proof that your website was the best option. The goal was volume. Over time, we reached the point where these techniques started to do harm.

It doesn’t work like that today. And it’s not just that Google has tightened the rules. Google stopped treating links as the primary variable long ago, and a whole range of signals now feeds into how links are assessed. It can work things out differently: from entities, from the brand, from how often people talk about you, search for you directly and in what context. Links are still an important factor today, but they are just one layer in a much more complex system. Sometimes I even do link building without adding a link. The question, of course, is whether that can still broadly be called link building at all.

This article is about how backlinks work, how to earn them so that they help you rather than harm you and, above all, why mindlessly placing links has stopped being a strategy. I’m writing it as a link builder who runs eleven websites of my own (zijuspesne.cz, moony.cz, max-reality.cz, zakeri.cz and others) and who works or has worked for clients such as XTB, Chlorito, FABINI, CEMI, Erika Fashion and Manboxeo. From that perspective, I’ll set out what I actually look at in link building and what Google actually cares about.

A short history, how links became Google’s best signal, then its worst

For today’s situation to make sense, you need to understand where Google has come from in this area.

Layer one: PageRank and the original brilliant idea (1998–2010). Larry Page and Sergey Brin built Google on a simple idea: if someone links to your website, it is an act of trust. A link was seen as a citation in the academic world. If lots of websites link to you, you are an authority. If authoritative websites link to you, you are an even bigger authority. It was elegant, it worked better than anything before it, and it catapulted Google to the top. In this article I only talk about Google, although at that time Seznam (Czech search engine) was also very relevant in the Czech Republic, but it essentially adopted the same evaluation approach.

Layer two: the spam explosion (2005–2012). Once the world understood how Google worked, it started abusing the system. We SEO consultants started hacking the system. Link directories appeared, along with footers stuffed with links to bursting point. Over a beer, we sometimes chat about how some people got rich from it. At that time I was only just getting my first taste of SEO. PBNs (Private Blog Networks). Comment spam farms. Article spinning: generating thousands of variations of one article scattered across the internet. Link building became a cost item in the budget, not a reflection of real quality. And Google had a problem. Its main relevance signal could be manipulated.

Layer three: Penguin and the start of the clean-up (2012). In April 2012, Google rolled out the Penguin update. It targeted unnatural link profiles. Suddenly, websites that had spent years building on link networks vanished from the top 10. Spam directories lost their value overnight. PBNs took a hit. Link building stopped being a numbers game and became a qualitative discipline, at least for those who understood this in time. Link building had to be done more cleverly. That is really when the battle between Google and SEO consultants began.

Layer four: machine learning, entities and brand (2018 to today). This is where the fundamental change came, and most people still haven’t caught up with it. Google no longer needs links as its only authority signal. It has RankBrain (2015), BERT (2019), MUM (2021) and today a whole layer of LLMs that understand the context of a website. It can calculate how many people search for you directly. It can calculate the contexts in which people talk about you and what associations a given brand has (which a link builder should also work with). It can calculate whether you are cited by major brand entities or by a PBN from Vietnam. And it can do this without an active link: a mention, a brand mention or a contextual association is enough.

The practical consequence: today you can have a website without thousands of links but with a strong brand signal, and you can win rankings in a particular niche. And the reverse is true. You can have a website with thousands of links but a weak brand, and the rankings don’t come. Typically, strong content websites have completely lost their power in recent years. This is the line that separates SEO in 2015 from SEO in 2026.

What a backlink actually is

A backlink is a hyperlink on another website that points to your website. Nothing more, nothing less. In code it looks like <a href="https://your-website.cz">link text</a>. Links have been around since the beginning of the internet and connect the whole internet so that people can move between individual pages. In fact, Google itself was, and still essentially is, a list of links one below another. Google’s mission was to order links by relevance.

More important than the link itself is the anchor text (the text you click on) and the context (the text around the link and the topic of the page it comes from). I’ll cover both in detail below.

Why brand and associations now beat the number of links

Google, like LLMs, plays a game of entities. What is an entity? Any identifiable “thing”: a brand, a person, a place, a concept, a product. Apple is an entity. Patrik Pilous is an entity. “Link building” is an entity. For each entity, Google keeps a graph: what is related to what, who talks about it, in what contexts and with what associations.

Now the key point. A link is just one way your entity connects with other entities. But there are other, stronger signals:

• Brand search volume: how many people search for you directly on Google (“patrik pilous”, “patrik pilous SEO”). Google sees this directly and it can’t be faked. Logically, the more, the better.
• Co-occurrence in texts: how often your brand appears in texts alongside relevant topics. “Patrik Pilous SEO consultant” is a brand association. I don’t want to build the association “Patrik Pilous volleyball player”. I need to build a professionally relevant association. “XTB the largest online broker” is an association. “Chlorito honest Czech pool chemicals” is a brand association.
• Brand mentions without a link: when someone writes about you and doesn’t add a link, Google sees it. And today it counts it too.
• Click data in the SERP: when people choose you in the SERP, it strengthens your authority status compared with competitors.
• Consistency across the website: whether your domain consistently covers one topic in depth, then

Together, I call these brand entity signals. And it’s a logical extension of what I wrote about brand associations. Today Google assesses the same things you assess when choosing between two brands in a supermarket. How do I feel about that name? In what context have I heard it? Who was talking about it?

A practical example. Take a perfume e-shop. Version A has 500 links from PR articles over the last 12 months, but hardly anyone searches for the brand directly on Google. Version B has 80 links, but 3,500 people a month search for the brand directly and write about it on Recenze.cz, Heureka, in forums and on social media. Version B wins. And this isn’t theory, it’s what I actually see with the clients I work with. That’s why link building can’t be done in isolation at all, and it can’t be done the way it was 8 years ago either.

What does this mean for your link building?

1. Link building can’t be a separate discipline from branding. If you build links but don’t invest in making people remember you, you’re pouring money into a leaky bucket.
2. A brand mention without a link has value. If Hospodářské noviny mentions you without a link, take it.
3. The quality of a link’s context matters more than quantity. One link from an article that is 100% on your niche beats ten links from generic PR.
4. PR and digital PR are part of SEO today, not a parallel discipline.

This idea runs through everything you’ll find in the article below. If you keep it in mind as the common thread, the rest makes sense on its own.

Where E-E-A-T comes in

All of this has an official name too. What Google sums up as E-E-A-T, meaning experience, expertise, authoritativeness and trustworthiness, is really exactly the brand signal I’m talking about. A link is just one way to prove to Google that someone trustworthy and authoritative stands behind a website. Mentions without links, direct brand searches and the context in which people talk about you all play the same tune. And in a world where answers are increasingly put together by artificial intelligence, which is what GEO deals with, this applies twice over. The model chooses whom to cite and reaches for sources it trusts, not for whoever has bought the most links.

Types of links you need to be able to tell apart

A link has an attribute that determines how Google processes it:

• Dofollow (the default): Google follows the link and counts it as an authority signal. This is what you want.
• Nofollow (rel="nofollow"): Google sees the link but shouldn’t pass authority through it. Note: since 2019, nofollow has been a “hint”, not a strict rule. Google can choose when to count it.
• Sponsored (rel="sponsored"): explicitly marks a paid link. You should use it wherever you pay for a link (PR articles, partnerships). In the past, link building often involved negotiating with publishers so that they would not add it. Today, a certain number of sponsored links is not necessarily a bad thing.
• UGC (rel="ugc"): user-generated content. Links from comments, forums and other user-generated content. These links are growing in importance.

A practical rule. A nofollow link is not “worthless”, as is sometimes wrongly claimed. It helps you with traffic (people click through from it), with brand mentions and with diversifying your profile. If your profile were 100% dofollow, it would look suspicious to Google.

Internal, external, outbound

• Internal links: links within your website, from page A to page B. They are not “backlinks”, but they are just as important for SEO. This is called internal linking. If you want the details, I have an article on it: Website architecture and structure.
• External links (backlinks): from someone else’s website to yours. These are what this article is about.
• Outbound links: from your website to other sites. Yes, these have an effect too. When you link to quality sources, it strengthens your topical credibility. When you link to spam and dubious websites, it harms you. In short.

Editorial vs. paid

• Editorial link: someone decided to link to you because you provided value. The goal of every link builder. The idea is to create content that attracts the attention of other websites. If you have original data and surveys, the media are happy to cite or republish them.
• Paid / sponsored link: you bought the placement. It works, but it must be marked as sponsored (Google requires this and checks it).

What makes a backlink high quality

This is where we get to the heart of the matter. When a client asks me “is this link any good?”, I run through six things in my head.

1. Authority of the linking domain

DR (Domain Rating) from Ahrefs: 0 to 100, on a logarithmic scale. DR 50 is considerably stronger than DR 40. But the most important thing is the website’s organic traffic. DR has very little relevance.

A bit more on DR, because it is the most overrated number in all of link building. Domain authority, called Domain Rating in Ahrefs, is an estimate of a website’s strength on a scale of 0 to 100, but be careful, it is not a Google metric. SEO tools came up with it to squeeze the complex reality of links into a single number. I treat it as a quick guide, not as a goal. A website with DR 70 and a page with no visits will give you less than a website with DR 35 and a page that people actually read. To be honest, I don’t understand why real traffic isn’t reflected in DR. So always check the number against the traffic of the specific page.

2. Real traffic of the linking page

More important than the domain’s DR is the traffic of the specific page the link comes from. A website with DR 70, but the page your link is on gets 5 visits a month? The link will give you little. A website with DR 35, but the page gets 2,000 visits a month? That is a different calibre altogether.

In Ahrefs, you can see this in the “Page traffic” column of the Backlink report. Never take links from pages that are not in Google’s index.

3. Topical relevance

Using language models, Google understands very well what your website is about and what the linking website is about. A link from a topically distant website (food blog → loans) is worth far less today than it was ten years ago.

When building links, look for:

• websites in your exact niche
• websites in a wider topical family (perfume e-shop → fashion, beauty, lifestyle website)
• geographically relevant websites (CZ → CZ for a Czech project)

4. Position of the link on the page

• In-content link in the middle of the text = the most valuable. It indicates editorial intent.
• Sidebar or footer link = considerably less valuable. It looks like a site-wide link, often a paid one.
• Site-wide link (on all URLs of a website at once) = Google treats it as one link, not a hundred.

5. Anchor text

Anchor text determines which keyword the link helps you rank for. But overdoing it is the fastest route to a penalty. Ideally, it should sit completely naturally in the text and genuinely help the user.

6. Indexability and HTML quality

If a link comes from a page that Google does not index (noindex), it is money down the drain. If the page sits deep in an archive with no internal links, Google may never reach it. Always check whether the linking URL is indexed (just use site:url in Google). And of course, the more important and visited the page is, the better.

I will stress this again, because a lot of people have been burnt by it. A link is only worth something if Google can actually reach it. If the linking page carries noindex, or Google does not have it in its index for some other reason (you can check easily with the site operator), the link is invisible for rankings, no matter what you paid for it.

Before you pursue a link anywhere, check that the page is indexed. For paid and untrustworthy links, the nofollow attribute is appropriate so that your profile looks natural.

Table, high-quality vs. low-quality backlink

Attribute	Likely a quality link	Likely a low-quality link
Domain DR (I don’t rely on it much)	30+ (for typical niches)	below 10
Page traffic	500+ visits/month	0–100 visits/month
Topical relevance	same or closely related niche	unrelated to your field
Position	in-content, in the main text, with context	irrelevant placement
Anchor text	brand, keyword, good context	exact match keyword stuffing
Attribute	dofollow or sponsored	nofollow from a forum / comment
Indexing of the linking URL	indexed by Google	noindex or unreachable
Surrounding context	text on your website’s topic	random word salad
Growth dynamics	gradual, organic	50 links from one source with the same pattern

How to find out how many backlinks you have (and what to do with them)

Ahrefs shows that “number of backlinks” (počet zpětných odkazů) gets 4,700 searches a month in the Czech Republic. People want a concrete result for their own website. However, the results in Ahrefs are often distorted.

Google Search Console (free)

If your website is verified in GSC, go to Reports → Links. You will see:

• Top linked pages: where most links point
• Top linking sites: who links to you the most
• Top linking text: which anchor texts are used

Pros: the data comes directly from Google, it is free and it is for your own website.
Cons: GSC does not see all links (Google does not publish the full graph), it does not show the history of lost links and it does not allow filtering by metrics.

Ahrefs

For professional analysis, I have used Ahrefs for many years. Specifically:

• Site Explorer → Backlinks: a complete list of links with metrics for each
• Referring domains: how many unique domains link to you (more important than the number of links)
• Anchors: anchor text distribution
• New / Lost backlinks: what has been gained and lost
• Best by links growth: which pages are gaining links fastest

What to actually read from the data

This matters more than which tool you use. When I audit a link profile, I look at 6 things:

1. Referring domains, not links. 1,000 links from 50 domains are worth less than 200 links from 200 domains.
2. How many outbound links the domain has. Many link builders ignore this metric, but it is extremely important. If you get a link from the most relevant website in your industry and it has only 12 outbound links, that link is worth many times more than any links from the strongest media domains in the Czech Republic.
3. Growth dynamics. Is the profile growing gradually or in jumps? Jumps look suspicious.
4. Anchor distribution. Is 60% of your anchor text “best loan”? A penalty is on the horizon.
5. Top 20 links. These hold the majority of the equity. Are they high quality? Indexed? Do they still exist?
6. Lost links. What have we lost over the past year, and why?

7 proven ways to get backlinks

Here is the list I actually use. No “blog comments” or “directory submissions” in 2008 style. Only what works today.

1. Linkbait content with your own data

The strongest format for earning links editorially. You create content that is a citable object in its own right: original research, original data, a ranking, a calculator. People link to it because it serves them as evidence or a source.

Examples that work:

• rankings (“The 50 most searched terms in the Czech Republic in 2025”)
• original research (“We analysed 10,000 e-shops and this is what we found”)
• calculators and tools
• glossaries

This method is expensive to produce, but one strong piece of content attracts dozens of links over the years. It goes hand in hand with your SEO copywriting having a higher ambition than “a blog article”.

2. Guest posts in relevant magazines

A classic that still works. You find authoritative magazines in your niche, pitch them an original article with your perspective, and they publish it with a link to you.

Rules:

• no “guest post farm” networks with dozens of client articles
• no publishing the same article on multiple websites
• yes to editorial standards and quality writing
• yes to topics relevant to the given magazine

3. Link exchanges

Because I have many content websites, I can get links even from websites that don’t sell them. We simply exchange links in a three-way arrangement. Exchanges are the most effective technique for me, partly because I have something to offer. The vast majority of link builders don’t have these options, so this technique is out of reach for them.

4. PR and expert commentary

• LinkedIn for building expert status (LinkedIn posts sometimes lead to links in PR articles about you)
• Pitching journalists directly with expert commentary on a current topic

Today this is the most undervalued method, because it takes effort. Most people don’t do it. That’s why it works.

5. Partnerships, suppliers, client testimonials

If you work in B2B, you have a network of clients, suppliers and partners who can mention you on their websites. “Case study”, “we work with”, “our partners”, “we recommend”: all of these are valid formats. I try to cover as many places as possible that are free to get into and relevant. For example, wherever your logo appears, it’s worth getting a link to you and your brand as well.

6. Local citations and industry directories

If you run a local business, Firmy.cz, Google Business Profile, Mapy.cz and industry directories in your segment are all valid citations that strengthen your local entity. This isn’t about link authority in the classic sense.

7. Digital PR, your own data as a shareable asset

Link bait at a higher level. You create research or an analysis and then actively distribute it to journalists. The goal isn’t just to wait organically for links but to actively generate them.

A real-world example. For one of my projects, we analysed how much people in the Czech Republic pay for estate agency services in different regions. The data was original. We sent it to property and finance media. The links poured in, because the content was a ready-made, data-backed story for journalists.

Anchor text, why it matters more than you think

Anchor text is the clickable part of a link. For Google, it’s a strong semantic signal. I used to explain that anchor text should reveal “what the link is about and what you’ll find on the target page”. I’ve since rethought this a little and now extend it to the context around the link as well. Simply put, from the sentence containing the link, the user should have a good idea of roughly what is on the page behind it.

And that’s exactly why it’s the fastest route to a penalty if you overdo it.

I’ve also written a separate explanation of anchor text, covering the individual types from exact match through branded to naked URLs. If you want to go deeper, take a look at the term anchor text. For link building, the main takeaway is this. A natural profile mixes types and never pushes nothing but exact match for a single keyword. That’s the pattern Google can detect fastest.

What anchor text distribution is recommended?

Here are the indicative percentages currently recommended for anchor text. In my view, they’re a guide for beginners, but different brands call for different mixes.

• 30–40% branded (your brand)
• 20–30% naked URL or generic
• 20–25% partial match (keyword variations)
• 5–15% exact match (exact keyword)
• 0–5% image (alt text of an image used as a link)

If 70% of your anchors are the exact match “best loan”, Google sees it as manipulation, together with the placement patterns. Today, though, Google can detect much subtler patterns in link building too.

How much backlinks cost in the Czech Republic

Briefly, because I’ve already written about it in detail here. I do link building for mid-sized clients and always recommend a minimum link building credit budget of 10,000 CZK (about 410 EUR). Links most commonly cost between 700 and 4,000 CZK (about 160 EUR). When I calculated the average for the links I’ve acquired, it came to 1,650 CZK (about 68 EUR).

Monthly link building retainer: 10,000 to 50,000 CZK (about 410 to 2,100 EUR) per month, depending on the number of links, their quality, the share of own content and outreach intensity.

Back to brand, and why it all connects

I want to return to the idea from the beginning. Link building isn’t a separate discipline. It’s an expression of your brand in the digital space.

If you work on making people remember you, search for you directly, talk about you and mention you in podcasts, comments and PR articles, links will come as a by-product. And they’ll be the best links possible. Editorial, contextual, topically relevant, not begged for. Of course, if you monitor all these activities, you can squeeze many more links out of them.

If, on the other hand, you work only on links without investing in your brand, you’ll end up with a decent link profile but Google won’t give you rankings. Because your brand entity is weaker than your link portfolio. And Google sees that.

If you’re thinking about this strategically, I recommend looking at how brand associations work. The same principles that explain why people remember Nike rather than an unknown sports brand also apply in Google. Only instead of human memory, there’s an algorithm at work, but it behaves in a similar way. When I propose a link building budget, I ask how much the company systematically invests in its brand. Link building costs should be at least 10 times lower. For larger companies, even 30 times.

Frequently asked questions about backlinks

What is a dofollow and a nofollow link?

Dofollow is the default link type, which Google follows and counts as an authority signal. Nofollow (rel="nofollow") instructs Google not to pass authority through the link. Since 2019, nofollow has been a “hint”, not a strict rule. Google can choose when to count it. A healthy profile needs both types.

How many backlinks do I need?

Wrong question. The right question is which domains are relevant to me and how my main competitors are doing. For a small local project, 20–50 quality domains may be enough. But with a good structure, you can even dominate with 10 links. For strong e-commerce competition, it can make sense to continuously set aside an amount for link building based on turnover and margin. More important than the absolute number is your profile compared with the competition in the top 10 for your target phrase.

How quickly will Google see a link?

It depends on the crawl frequency of the linking page. For authoritative magazines, usually within a few days. For weaker websites, weeks. In general, it’s a good sign if the page is indexed within 2–3 hours.

Can I buy backlinks?

You can, and it happens all the time. The rules: mark some paid links with the sponsored attribute, avoid networks, don’t buy “300 links” packages, buy from editorial magazines with real traffic and a clear line of communication, and keep an eye on your anchor profile. In all the time I’ve been doing link building, I’ve come across only one client who did it well. The vast majority of owners or managers who cobble together their own link building based on a couple of articles they’ve read actually end up doing more harm than good.

What is link juice?

A conceptually outdated term, but still in use. It means “the authority a link passes from the linking website to yours”. In today’s ecosystem, it’s more of a metaphor than a real measurable value. Google stopped using linear PageRank long ago. But we can picture it like this: if we have an extremely relevant article in our field with a single link in it, the notional link juice is far greater than from a sponsored article on a low-quality website that also includes other competitors.

How often should I check my link profile?

Active monitoring once a month, in-depth analysis once a quarter. Track: new links (who has started linking to you), lost links (where you’ve lost a link), anchor distribution, suspicious domains and growth dynamics. A link builder checks the link profile continuously.

What should I do if someone floods me with spam links?

Negative SEO attacks are a common reality. The response: in 99% of cases, Google ignores spam algorithmically. If you see a manual action in GSC or a clear drop in rankings linked to a growing spam profile, use the Disavow Tool. Before that, it’s best to consult an SEO consultant, because using Disavow incorrectly can do more harm than good.

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Backlinks still matter. But no longer as the primary lever for growth. Their role and use have changed significantly. They are a consequence of doing things well. That means having content that deserves to be cited, a brand worth mentioning and a product that works.

If you approach link building by going from cause (a quality website plus brand) to effect (links), it works better. If you reverse it (buying links to make up for a weak website), it doesn’t work. Of course, buying, link exchanges and other techniques still have their place, but they shouldn’t be the dominant activity.

And if you need a partner for this, take a look at how I do it. Or get in touch via the contact form or on LinkedIn. I’ve worked with over 50 link building clients, and with many of them I’ve gone all the way from buying links to today’s work with brand and a form of PR.

Euro amounts are approximate, converted at the Czech National Bank rate of 24.34 CZK per EUR on 29 October 2026.