Backlink Profile

A link profile is an evaluation of every backlink (count, quality, variety, etc.) that a website has.

Backlinks are hyperlinks pointing to your site from another site. Search engines are likely to view your website as more reliable and authoritative if it attracts credible backlinks.

Check out this example of our article on brand publishers.

Source

You can see this excerpt features backlinks to Netflix and Salesforce. In the search engines’ eyes, these links increase the targeted site’s credibility as a source of useful, informative content.

Backlinks vs Internal Links

While internal links help visitors and web crawlers navigate your site, make for a coherent reading experience and create content pillars, they are a separate mechanism to backlinks.

Below is an example of internal linking. As you can see in the bottom left of the image, the link references another SODP article.

Source

To learn more about internal links and their benefits, check out our module on the subject.

3.9.2 Do Backlinks Matter for SEO?

Google said in 2016 that backlinks were one of the top three search ranking factors considered by the algorithm. It has not updated this position since, so we have no reason to assume this is not still the case.

If your site has a large number of credible backlinks, it will likely feature higher on the search engine results pages (SERPs). Search engines use several subfactors in the overall evaluation of the impact and quality of your backlink profile that eventually determines your ranking