Three myths about backlinks

This is one of those topics that looks small until it costs you something. A few things about backlinks that get repeated more often than they get checked.

Technical fixes remove obstacles; content earns the position. Both are needed and they are not interchangeable. Doing this properly once is usually cheaper than doing it approximately three times.

“It only matters for big sites”

A handful of relevant links beats hundreds of irrelevant ones. Getting it slightly wrong is survivable. Ignoring it entirely is not. Anything you cannot measure here, you are deciding by taste, which is fine as long as everyone knows it.

“We can deal with it after launch”

Sometimes true, usually expensive. It is worth being explicit about, because assumptions differ quietly.

“Our platform handles it”

Being genuinely useful is still the most durable link strategy. In practice this is a scheduling problem more than a technical one. Check it against what you would want a competitor's site to get wrong.

The short version

Search engines are trying to answer a question, so the pages that answer questions clearly tend to do well. Three things worth confirming about backlinks before you move on:

• Someone can say what the current setup is without going to look
• Being genuinely useful is still the most durable link strategy — and you know whether that is true here
• There is a way to tell whether the last change to this helped

Worth checking on your own setup before it becomes someone else's problem to fix.