There’s no such thing as a backlink
12th August, 2025
A link is not a “thing” you can own. It’s not a point in a spreadsheet, or a static object you can collect and trade like a baseball card.
And it’s certainly not a “one-way vote of confidence” in your favour.
A link is a relationship.
Every link connects two contexts: a source and a destination. That connection exists only in the relationship between those two points – inheriting its meaning, relevance, and trust from both ends at once. Break either end, and the link collapses. Change either end, and its meaning shifts.
If you want to understand how search engines, LLMs, and AI agents perceive and traverse the web, you have to start from this idea: links are not things. They are edges in a graph of meaning and trust.
Why “backlink” is a problem
That’s why “backlink” is such a loaded, dangerous word.
The moment you call it a backlink, you flatten the concept into something purely about you. You stop thinking about the source. You stop thinking about why the link exists. You strip away its context, its purpose, its role in the broader ecosystem.
And what’s on the other side – is that a “forward link”? Of course not. We’d never use that phrase because it’s absurd. Yet “backlink” has been normalised to the point where we’ve trained ourselves to see only one direction: inbound to us.
This isn’t harmless shorthand. It’s an active simplification – a way of collapsing something messy and multi-dimensional into a clean, one-directional metric that fits neatly in a monthly report.
Flattening complexity for convenience
The real problem with “backlink” isn’t just that it’s inaccurate – it’s that it’s convenient.
Modelling, tracking, and valuing the true nature of a link – as a relationship between two entities, grounded in trust, context, and purpose – is complicated. It’s hard to scale. It doesn’t always fit neatly in a dashboard.
Flatten it into “backlink count,” and suddenly you have a number. You can set a target, buy some, watch the line go up. It doesn’t matter if the links are contextless, untrusted, or fragile – the KPI looks good.
That’s why so many bought links don’t move the needle. They’re designed to satisfy the simplified model, not the underlying reality. You’re optimising for the report, not the algorithm.
The industry’s other convenient fictions
This isn’t just about “backlinks” or “link counts.” The link economy thrives on invented terminology because it turns the intangible into something tradable:
- “Journalist links” aren’t a distinct species of link. They’re just… links. Links from journalists, sure, but still subject to the same rules of trust, context, and relevance as everything else. Calling them “journalist links” lets agencies sell them as a premium product, implying some magic dust that doesn’t exist.
- “Niche edits” is a euphemism for “retroactively inserting a link into an existing page.” In reality, the practice often creates a weaker connection than the original content warranted, and risks breaking the source’s context entirely. But “niche edit” sounds tidy, productised, and easy to buy.
- “DoFollow links” don’t exist. Links are followable by default, and even
nofollowis more of a hint than a block. The term was invented to make the normal behaviour of the web sound like a special feature you can pay for.
There are dozens of these terms, all designed to artificially flatten and simplify, in a way which is deeply harmful.
And then there’s “link building”
“Link building” might be the most damaging term of all.
It makes the whole process sound mechanical. Industrial. Like you’re stacking identical units until you hit quota. The phrase itself erases the reality that the value of a link is inseparable from why it exists, who created it, and whether trust flows through it.
Yes, you can “build” a collection of links. You can even hit your targets. But if those links aren’t grounded in trust, context, and mutual relevance, you haven’t built anything with lasting value. You’ve just arranged numbers in a report.
Real links – the kind that carry authority, relevance, and resilience over time – aren’t built. They’re earned. They emerge from relationships, collaboration, and shared purpose.
The web is not a ledger
The mental model that search engines are just “counting backlinks” is hopelessly outdated.
The web is not a static ledger of inbound links. It’s a living, constantly shifting graph of relationships – semantic, topical, and human.
For a search engine, a link is one of many signals. It inherits meaning from:
- The page it’s on – its quality, trustworthiness, and topic.
- The words around it – anchor text, surrounding copy, and implicit associations.
- The nature of the source – how it connects to other sites and pages, its history, and its place in the graph.
- The wider topology – how that connection interacts with other connections in the ecosystem.
This is the reality that “backlink count” and “link building” both paper over – the algorithm is modelling relationships of trust, not transactions.
Search engines, LLMs, and agents don’t care about “backlinks”
Here’s the crucial shift: the future of discovery won’t be “ten blue links” driven by link-counted rankings.
LLMs and AI agents don’t think in backlinks at all. They parse the web as a network of entities, concepts, and connections. They care about how nodes in that network relate to each other – how trust, authority, and relevance propagate along the edges.
Yes, they may still evaluate links (directly, or indirectly). In fact, links can be a useful grounding signal: a way of connecting claims to sources, validating relationships, and reinforcing topical associations. But those links are never considered in isolation. They’re evaluated alongside everything else – content quality, author credibility, entity relationships, usage data, and more.
That makes artificially “built” links stand out. Contextless, untrusted, or irrelevant links are easy to spot against the backdrop of a richer, more integrated model of the web. And easy to ignore.
In that world, a “backlink” as the SEO industry defines it – a one-way token of PageRank – is almost meaningless. What matters is the relationship: why the link exists, what it connects, what concepts it reinforces, and how it integrates into the larger graph.
Why the language persists
The reason we still say “backlink” and “link building” isn’t because they’re the best descriptors. It’s because they’re useful – for someone else.
Vendors, brokers, and marketplaces love these terms. They make something messy, relational, and human sound like a measurable commodity. That makes it easier to sell, easier to buy, and easier to report on.
If you frame links as “relationships” instead, you make the job harder – and you make the value harder to commoditise. Which is precisely why the industry’s resale economy prefers the simpler fiction.
Optimising for the wrong web
If your mental model is still “get more backlinks” or “build more links,” you’re optimising for the wrong web.
The one we’re already in doesn’t reward accumulation – it rewards integration. It rewards being part of a meaningful network of relevant, trusted, and semantically connected entities.
That means:
- Stop chasing raw counts.
- Stop buying neat-sounding products that exist to make reporting easy.
- Start building relationships that make sense in context.
- Think about how your site fits into the broader topical and semantic ecosystem.
- Design links so they deserve to exist, and make sense from both ends.
The takeaway
There is no such thing as a backlink.
There is no such thing as “DoFollow links,” “journalist links,” or “niche edits.”
And if “link building” is your strategy, you’re already thinking in the wrong dimension.
There are only relationships – some of which happen to be expressed through HTML <a> elements.
If you want to thrive in a search environment increasingly shaped by AI, entity graphs, and trust networks, stop flattening complexity and start earning your place in the web’s map of meaning.
Stop chasing backlinks. Stop buying fictions.
Start building relationships worth mapping.
I always thought about link building as building bridges to a website through which people could come and visit. Perhaps it has to do with having been inspired by Eric Ward early on in my career, his words have stuck with me: “Links are not things. Links were never supposed to be a commodity. Links were — and remain — the online evidence of a person’s desire to curate or share something useful, funny, thought-provoking, educational, controversial, or enlightening. Links are affirmations, opinions, proofs, examples, validations. And most importantly, links and linking related signals remain the primary way people discover content.”