A backlink counter is a tool through which you analyze how many times external websites link back to you, thus creating a backlink from their site to yours, how qualitative these links are and if search engines can or cannot follow them. A backlink can be any clickable link directing the user from one website to another website, whether in the form of a direct URL, a linked keyword, a sponsored link, or an advertising banner.
Building these links requires research, access, and time and they work based on a direct quality-quantity ratio. Basically, the more high-quality backlinks you get, the better for you. And, by quality, we mean domain authority, links location, how they are processed, what they refer to, or how much people react to them.
Examples of backlink counter tools
There are a plethora of free backlink counter tools that help you check how many backlinks point to your website. Most backlink counter tools, like app.wirdelta.com, only count how many backlinks you have so you can quickly assess your current situation and start planning your SEO strategy based on that.
However, more complex tools, like Google Search Console, or SEMrush also have features that allow you to analyze the benefits or toxicity of backlinks and remove them when needed.
Why are backlinks important?
In general, there are two main benefits of backlinking. The most important one is that Google analyses your backlinks and determines your relevancy, credibility, and naturally site authority based on the quality of these links. In simple words, the more relevant and high-authority websites link back to you, the more high-quality links you get, and the more relevant you are.
So, as we can see, the relevance between linked sites is very important for the quality of backlinks. Once you see a backlink to your website, make sure the redirection backlink stays relevant to the context of your website, and the website linking to you is a trustworthy one. For example, you have an e-shop selling PCs and similar technology, it is natural to have backlinks to your site on websites related to technology.
Moreover, convenience is also important in terms of the context of the content in which the link is located. Make sure the links pointing to your content are always thematically related links. If not, such links will be significantly weaker, so not only they will not help you strengthen the position in organic results, but might even be harmful.
Moreover, backlinks continue to be a primary factor in Google’s SEO algorithms for Page Rank. So, even though backlinks arise naturally most of the time, the aim of your off-page SEO optimization is to support this process.
How do the backlinks work?
As mentioned, backlinks are hyperlinks that point to the website from other sites. However, in addition to their quantity, quality is a crucial parameter, i.e. importance of the source of the link.
The quality of backlinks is determined as follows:
- Link text – The text of the link itself, i.e. the part that can be clicked on, is of great importance. Links should not point to one page of the site and should not be in the same format.
- Relevancy – A quality backlink comes from a website that deals with a similar issue as the selected page (eg a website about programming links to a similarly focused website, also about programming).
- Trusted source – The site from which the link originates should publish quality content for its users and should be authoritative.
- Up-to-date links – Search engines notice how old the links are. Newer and more relevant links will give the site better search engine rankings.
- Page placement – Other factors that affect the weight of a link are its placement on the page and the placement of the referring page in the site structure.
- Anchor text – Type of anchor link within the text that links to a particular page. These are basically clickable words, highlighted by color, or underlined. Ideally, anchor texts should form keywords and phrases important to your business. The search engine says what the link is associated with. However, they should not be repeated very violently so as not to arouse suspicion that they are artificially created.
Is having more backlinks positive?
Usually, backlink counter tools give you a higher score when you have a lot of backlinks. That is because, the more backlinks to a given website, the more weight search engines attach to them. And based on that, they also rank them in higher positions and support their overall visibility on the Internet. However, backlinks must be relevant and come from trusted sources, which means that the key evaluation criterion is quality, not quantity.
For example, Google uses its algorithm to divide backlinks into natural and unnatural and then gives them weight to display the affected pages in search results. An excessive number of low-quality species, which is usually the result of reckless buying of links, can lead to a penalty of the website, which will cause a decrease in positions or even complete exclusion from the index.