Backlinks are links from other websites to your page. To a search engine they are like votes of confidence: if reputable, topically related sites point to your store, it is a sign that you are trustworthy and worth ranking. Backlinks are therefore among the strongest ranking signals - but the rule has shifted toward quality: one link from a reputable industry site means more than a dozen poor ones. Below is what makes a link good, how to earn them honestly, what to avoid, and how to deal with toxic ones.
Quality over quantity
The vast majority of professionals confirm that quality, relevance, and authority are in the foreground, not the sheer number of links. What makes a link valuable:
- Topical relevance: a link from a site in your industry counts the most - relevance is the most important factor.
- Authority of the source: sites with higher authority (Domain Rating) pass more equity.
- Actual traffic: a link from a page with real search traffic is worth more than from a dead page.
- Placement and nature: an editorially placed link within the content is worth more than a link in the footer or an ad.
Anchor text
Anchor text (the clickable text of a link) helps the search engine understand what the target page is about. It should be natural, descriptive, and varied. Overusing links with exactly the same keyword text looks unnatural and can trigger a penalty - so aim for variety, not forced repetition of keywords.
Concrete ideas: what you can do
First an important distinction: links can be "follow" (they pass equity and authority) or "nofollow" (the search engine treats them only as a hint). Social networks, forums, and profiles mostly give nofollow links - these do not directly raise rankings, but they are still useful: they bring traffic, brand awareness, AI visibility, and help the search engine discover content. Moreover, a natural profile is a mix of follow and nofollow; only-follow looks suspicious.
Fast and accessible (mostly nofollow - for discovery, traffic, awareness):
- A post or article on LinkedIn with a link to your guide, product, or research.
- An article on Medium or Substack and a profile with a link to the store.
- A thoughtful, useful answer in a relevant forum, on Reddit, or Quora (value, not spam - otherwise the effect is cancelled out).
- Business and industry profiles: Google Business Profile, reputable directories, local associations.
- A press release for a genuine news item - the links themselves are nofollow, but they attract journalists who write their own (editorial) stories.
High value (editorial links that raise authority):
- Answering journalist requests (HARO / Featured.com): a fast response means a greater chance of being published in a reputable outlet with a link.
- A link-worthy asset: a free tool, original research, statistics, or a calculator - such pages can collect thousands of links.
- Reclaiming unlinked mentions: find where you are mentioned without a link and politely ask them to link the mention (the highest success rate among tactics).
- Resource pages and broken link building: search for "your niche + useful links/tools" and offer your content as an addition.
- "Where to buy" pages at manufacturers and suppliers: if you sell their products, they often list you among authorised sellers.
- Selective guest writing on reputable related sites, podcast appearances, local sponsorships.
What to avoid
Buying links and link schemes are a violation of the search engine's rules and can lead to a penalty. In recent updates Google specifically targeted link networks, AI-generated "guest-post" farms, and thin directories that exist only to embed paid links. For online stores a common source of trouble is old directories and low-quality affiliate networks. The rule is simple: earned and relevant is safe, bought and mass-produced is a risk.
Toxic links and disavow
The search engine today automatically ignores most bad links, so there is no need to panic. Use the disavow tool with caution - mainly if you have a manual action for unnatural links or a well-founded suspicion that one is coming. Do not disavow legitimate links in the process. The links report in Google Search Console shows a sample of the links the search engine has crawled and passed through its filters; external tools (Ahrefs, Semrush) build their own lists, so a link that appears in them but not in Search Console often means the search engine has already devalued it.
How to support it in Magento
Backlinks arise outside your store, so this is not a setting in Magento - but in the store you can ensure the conditions for links to keep their value. Create link-worthy content (guides, quality category and product pages), maintain a clean and stable URL structure, and set a 301 redirect whenever an address changes, so the equity of the links you have earned is not lost. Magento manages redirects in the URL rewrites section.
How to measure whether it works
In Google Search Console, in the links report, track the main sites linking to you, the most linked pages, and the anchor texts. With external tools track the trend of authority (Domain Rating) and the link profile, and in parallel the referral traffic and the rankings of the target pages. The goal is not many links but a few quality, relevant ones that raise authority and, with it, the rankings of important pages.
