Last week, I met a marketing director of a SaaS company who made a confession: his company had spent $2 million on backlinks over the past 3 years.
When I asked what results they’d seen, he shrugged…
“We’re not really sure they made any difference.”
This isn’t surprising. So many businesses are pouring thousands, sometimes millions, into backlink strategies with little tangible proof of their effectiveness…
It begs the question…
Do backlinks still work in 2025?
I’ve just got back from a 12,000-mile trip to Vietnam to discuss this exact topic with industry leaders at the SEO Mastery Summit, analyzing data from clients who’ve seen 242% year-on-year growth and generating an extra $200K in revenue through strategic SEO, I can give you a definitive answer.
Do want to read… I got you 👇
Why Google Still Relies on Backlinks as Signals
Google is a business, and its business is an ads platform first and a search engine second.
It wants to sell advertising – that’s how it makes its money, and it does that by selling ads on search results.
Google also wants to deliver its results, process, index, and rank websites as fast and as cheaply as possible.
To do that, it relies heavily on signals over necessarily trying to understand and grade who has the best content out there.
It’s much easier and quicker to use various signals to understand what’s good, what’s trusted, what’s authoritative, and what’s not.
The strongest signal in 2025 is still backlinks.
Backlinks Are Like Restaurant Recommendations
The way you need to view backlinks are as recommendations.
Every link from one website to your website is a recommendation of “hey, I think this is a trustworthy, good, useful product, brand, or source of information.”
The next step of understanding is the quality and relevance of those recommendations. Let’s take a completely abstract example of restaurant recommendations.
The Drunk Strangers on the Street
Let’s say you’re on the hunt for a new restaurant – maybe you’re looking for the best new Italian restaurant.
One day you’re walking down the street and you bump into a group of unknown people.
They’re drunk, they’re loud, and for whatever reason they start telling you about this place down the road – “it’s the best ever, you can’t go wrong, we’ve just eaten there, it’s amazing!”
While it sounds like a great recommendation, you probably take it with a pinch of salt because these are unknown people, they’re in the street, it’s night, they’re all drunk.
It’s probably the local kebab shop or something. It’s not the most trustworthy thing, but maybe it sits on your radar a little bit somewhere.
Your Friend James the Foodie
The next thing you do, you see your friend James.
James is a bit of a foodie, but he’s by no means a chef.
However, he knows the local area and he gives you a restaurant recommendation.
Well, okay, it’s a trusted source to you, it’s kind of relevant to the local area, and you know he knows a little bit about food.
So you take it – “James says it’s good, maybe it’s worth trying, we’ll see.”
You might wait for more recommendations, but if other people tell you it’s good, then hey, great.
Gordon Ramsay’s Recommendation
Then the third person you meet – and you just happen to bump into Gordon Ramsay, famous chef, well-renowned chef – and you ask him for a recommendation.
He recommends the restaurant: “This is the place you have to go, this is the best place that I’ve eaten in town, it’s the best Italian food, you have to go there.”
Wow, okay. You take that recommendation with a lot of authority.
You say, “Well, if Gordon Ramsay says it’s good, then that must be a trusted, great place to go.” It’s highly authoritative, it’s a trustworthy source, and it’s relevant to what you’re looking for.
Applying This to Backlinks
We can take that metaphor and apply it to backlinks:
- Lots of backlinks from unknown, wishy-washy, untrusted sources are taken with a pinch of salt. They’re not that relevant, they’re not that interesting. Google’s algorithm is not really going to pay any attention to them, just as you wouldn’t.
- Mid-tier links that might have some relevance or come from a trusted source within your industry or location are great – they’re going to pull a little more weight.
- The cream of the crop – the famous chef, the big news publishers, the best websites in your industry that are proven trusted sources of authoritative information – when you get a link from those, that is unignorable for a search engine. That’s the cream of the crop.
The Three Pillars of Quality Backlinks
If links equal recommendations, how do you go about understanding what’s a good link and what’s a bad link? There are three defining factors: Authority, Trust, and Relevance. The perfect link has all three.
1. Authority
An authoritative site has an almost impossibly hard-to-replicate set of links. They’re recommended and linked to from all the biggest sources in the industry, the biggest news publishers, even government and educational websites. When they publish something, people sit up and listen.
2. Trust
Trustworthy sites are similar, but maybe they don’t have to be quite as authoritative in their link profile, but they are credible sources of information. These can be great seed sites to build your website as a real, legitimate business and brand. Think of sites like Crunchbase, Wikipedia, those sort of information providers. Even directories sometimes can carry a lot of weight to build your seed as a trustworthy entity around the web.
3. Relevance
Relevancy is simply a site that’s related within your industry or niche. Whether that’s another local business, a directory in your business area, a publisher, a magazine, a news site, suppliers – anything like that that’s relevant to your niche or around the shoulders of your niche.
The Reality of Perfect Backlinks
If you’ve got a site that has all three of those criteria, then you’re winning. The only problem with perfect backlinks? They’re rare and/or expensive.
If you’re going to go down the route of buying backlinks, then they’re going to cost thousands of dollars usually.
To get them naturally or to get featured in these publications, you have to have something really important worth talking about, great information, or already be a trustworthy or authoritative relevant source of information.
To make things easier, you should be happy with two of these three criteria:
1. trustworthy and relevant source
2. authoritative and relevant source
3. authoritative and trustworthy but maybe not quite relevant (maybe it’s a great news publisher but not directly related to your industry)
Even one is useful, especially a relevant website that is already ranking on Google. Maybe it’s another small local business or a smaller industry publisher – these can provide really great relevant backlinks.
Keep building backlinks
That’s really it for understanding whether a link is good or bad for your website: Is it authoritative? Is it trustworthy? Is it relevant?
You’re trying to tick those three boxes. If you can get one, great. If you can get two, then that’s worth going after.
The key is understanding that not all backlinks are created equal, and throwing money at low-quality links is like asking drunk strangers for restaurant recommendations – you might get a lot of noise, but you won’t get the results you’re looking for.
Focus on building relationships with authoritative, trustworthy, and relevant sources in your industry.
It takes more time and effort than buying bulk links, but the results speak for themselves – just ask my clients who’ve seen 242% growth and $200k in additional revenue from strategic SEO approaches.
