Backlink

There was a period when search engines ranked pages on the words written inside them and nothing else. That makes climbing the rankings simple: write your target search term 300 times at the bottom of the page in the same color as the background.

Pages built that way genuinely reached the top spot, even though a visitor found nothing worth reading. Letting a page describe itself left no way to check the exaggeration.

So the criterion moved outside the page. If another site links here, somebody read this and judged it worth pointing at. Counting what others say instead of what the page says about itself — and a backlink is the name for one instance of what others said.

One link works roughly like one vote, except the votes don't weigh the same. Several factors come into it.

1. Who is linking. A link from a long-running news site or a university carries more than one from a blog created yesterday. The estimate of that trust level is called domain authority.
2. Whether the subject matches. A developer blog linking to a page about collaboration tools fits the context. A link from an unrelated field weighs close to nothing.
3. The text on the link. The words you click tell the engine what the destination is about. "Collaborative document tool comparison" carries more than "here."
4. Where it sits. A link inside a sentence of body text counts for more than one listed in a block at the bottom of the page.

Links that aren't endorsements get marked so they won't be counted as votes — advertising placements, links users drop in comments. Buy links without that marking and, once detected, rankings go down rather than up.

Which is why the source matters more than the count. Links from a hundred unrelated sites are worth less than three from trusted sites in the same field.

"We picked up twelve backlinks this month and maybe two of them are worth anything."

The count rose, but few match on trust level and subject.

"That site sells links, so getting one there won't help us."

Purchased links either don't count or work against you.

"You used 'read more' as the link text — could you use the product name instead?"

A request to raise how much the anchor text communicates.

Pagedeck decided not to chase backlinks directly and to earn them through writing instead. Ravi published a piece collecting how teams adopt collaboration tools, and once the comparison table in it started getting cited, links appeared from a handful of developer blogs. Asking for links outright is its own activity, called link building; Pagedeck spends its time on making material worth citing.