What Are Backlinks? Complete Guide to Building Quality Links

Backlinks — also called inbound links or incoming links — are hyperlinks from one website pointing to another. They are one of the three pillars of SEO (alongside content and technical optimization) and remain the most powerful signal Google uses to assess a site's authority and relevance in search results.

The concept is straightforward: when Site A links to Site B, Google treats that link as a vote of confidence. The more high-quality, relevant sites link to your domain, the more authoritative your site appears to search engines — and the higher you rank in organic search results.

Types of Backlinks

Understanding the different types of backlinks is essential for building an effective strategy:

• Dofollow: Pass SEO authority to the linked site. These are the most valuable for rankings and the primary goal of any link building strategy.
• Nofollow: Include the rel="nofollow" attribute and traditionally don't pass direct authority. However, Google has acknowledged treating them as hints in certain contexts.
• Sponsored: Used for paid or advertising links, transparently signaling to Google that the placement is commercial.
• UGC (User Generated Content): Applied to links in forums, comments, and user-generated content sections.

How to Evaluate Backlink Quality

A single backlink from a high-authority, relevant site is worth more than hundreds of links from low-quality sources. Key quality metrics include:

• Domain Authority (DA) and Domain Rating (DR): Metrics from Moz and Ahrefs respectively. A backlink from a DA 70 domain outweighs 100 links from DA 10 sites.
• Topical relevance: A technology company getting a backlink from a tech media outlet gains more SEO value than one from a cooking blog.
• Organic traffic of the source domain: Sites with real traffic generate additional brand exposure beyond SEO benefit alone.
• Link placement: A link within the body of an article carries more authority than one in a footer or sidebar.
• Anchor text: The clickable text should be natural and relevant — over-optimized exact-match anchors can appear manipulative to Google.

Main Strategies to Build Quality Backlinks

• Press releases and digital PR: Distributing press releases to digital media outlets. When they publish the news with a link to your site, you earn backlinks from high-authority portals.
• Sponsored articles: Publishing valuable content on industry media with a dofollow link. Widely used by SEO agencies for its predictability and control.
• Guest posting: Writing articles for blogs and portals in your sector in exchange for a backlink.
• Link reclamation: Recovering unlinked brand mentions on other sites by asking authors to add the link.
• Linkable assets: Creating resources (studies, infographics, comprehensive guides) that others naturally cite and reference.

Backlinks in Latin America: Chile, Colombia, and Peru

In Latin American markets like Chile, Colombia, and Peru, link building in local media has an especially strong impact. SEO competition in local Spanish is lower than in English, and Google considers the geographic location of linking sites when determining relevance for local searches.

A backlink in Emol or La Tercera boosts rankings on Google.cl; one in El Tiempo or Semana has an effect on Google.com.co; one in El Comercio or Gestión impacts Google.com.pe. The geographic relevance of the media outlet matters as much as its DA.

How Many Backlinks Do I Need?

There's no magic number. What matters is quality and consistency. A strategy that builds 10–20 quality backlinks per month from relevant media far outperforms one that accumulates hundreds of low-quality links.

The key is to build systematically. Platforms like Esbuenisimo Links streamline the process with a marketplace of over 1,200 media outlets across Chile, Colombia, Peru, Mexico, Argentina, and more — with filters by DA, topic, and price to ensure every backlink is a strategic investment.