A backlink is when another website links to your website. Backlinks are important because they can impact your page ranking.

Backlinks show the search engine that a website has value because other websites are linking to it. Backlinks from trustworthy websites hold greater value than backlinks from less credible websites. 

Backlinks can also be referred to as an inbound link

Backlink VS. External Link

External links and backlinks are similar. An external link is when your website links to another website. External links can also be referred to as outbound links 

LINK JUICE 

Link juice is a term used in SEO that refers to passing on the SEO benefits of backlinks and external links to another website. If you link to too many external links, you are depriving the “juice”. Ideally, you would like link juice equity. So the number of backlinks equates to the number of links externally.  

NoFollow Tag

The No Follow tag is a tag you can add to your external links that signal the web crawler not to follow the link. Therefore, the external link will not impact your page ranking. 

The nofollow tag is an HTML attribute. Most CMS text editors automatically allow you to add the nofollow tag in your external links. You can add the no follow tag through HTML code as rel=nofollow. WordPress automatically adds the nofollow tag to links in comments that are often times spam. 

How to Count Your Backlinks

If you are curious and want to see who is linking to your website, you can use a backlink checker like Google Search Console.

A backlink analysis will give you a better understanding of your audience. You can see what types of websites are sending users. Ideally, quality websites will be sending users to you.