A backlink is a hyperlink on someone else's site that points to a page on your site. From your side it is an inbound link; from theirs it is an outbound link. Backlinks help search engines discover your pages, and Google treats them as one of many signals about a page's usefulness. Their value depends heavily on where they come from and why they exist.
How a backlink works
A backlink is just an HTML anchor element on another site with an href pointing at your URL. The clickable words are the anchor text, and optional rel attributes tell search engines how the linking site relates to the link.
<!-- On partner-site.com, linking to your integration page -->
<a href="https://www.example-saas.com/integrations/hubspot">
HubSpot integration for Example SaaS
</a>
<!-- The same link, qualified as paid -->
<a href="https://www.example-saas.com/" rel="sponsored">Example SaaS</a>What makes one backlink worth more than another
Google does not publish a formula, but its documentation and decades of public statements point in a consistent direction. A link carries more weight when it comes from a relevant, trusted page, sits in the main content where a reader would see it, and was placed because the author chose to reference you.
- Relevance: a link from a sales operations blog means more to a CRM tool than one from a recipe site
- Editorial choice: placed by the author, not inserted for payment or as a trade
- Placement: in the body text, not buried in a footer or a widget
- Linking page quality: a page that itself gets traffic and links
- Qualification: links marked nofollow, sponsored, or ugc are treated as hints and may pass little or nothing
Common sources for SaaS companies
B2B software companies tend to earn backlinks from a predictable set of places. Integration partners link from their marketplaces and help docs. Review sites and product directories link from listings. Customers sometimes mention you in case studies or tutorials. Original research, benchmark reports, and free tools attract links from writers who need something to cite.
Checking your backlinks
Search Console's Links report shows a sample of the sites Google has found linking to you, which pages they link to, and the most common anchor text. Third-party tools such as Ahrefs, Semrush, and Moz run their own crawlers and show a different, usually larger, sample. No tool sees every link Google sees, so treat any count as an estimate.
Common mistakes
Chasing volume over relevance
Hundreds of links from unrelated, low-quality sites are likely to be ignored by Google and can attract spam scrutiny. A few links from sites your buyers actually read do more.
Assuming every lost link is a problem
Links disappear all the time as pages are edited or removed. Investigate losses from important pages, not every drop in a tool's count.
Linking to the homepage only
Partners and directories often default to the homepage. Where it makes sense, ask them to link to the specific integration or feature page that matches the context.
Questions
There is no fixed number. It depends on the competition for the search, the quality of the links, and how well the page answers the query. Compare against the pages that currently rank, not a universal target.
Not necessarily. Google treats nofollow as a hint, so it may still use the link for discovery, and nofollow links can send real referral traffic and lead to other coverage.
No. Backlinks come from other domains. Links between pages on your own site are internal links, which matter for different reasons.
