Backlink
A backlink is a link from another website that points to a page on yours. Search engines read backlinks from trusted sites as a signal that your content is credible, which can lift your rankings.
Last updated: June 9, 2026
Think of a backlink as a recommendation. When a reputable site links to you, it's effectively vouching for your page, and search engines have long used that kind of endorsement to gauge authority. But not all links carry the same weight. A mention from a well-known industry publication counts for far more than a hundred links from spammy directories, and links earned because the content deserves them are worth more than ones you chase.
For an online store, useful backlinks tend to come from real coverage: a gift guide that features your product, a blogger reviewing something they bought, a supplier or partner linking back to you. Relevance matters as much as popularity. A link from a cooking site to your kitchenware shop is more valuable than an unrelated link with a bigger audience.
Chasing links through paid schemes or link farms can backfire, since Google discounts or penalizes manipulative patterns. The durable approach is making products and content worth talking about, then giving people easy reasons to reference you.
Related terms
Alt text
Alt text is a short written description of an image, added in the HTML, that screen readers read aloud to people who can't see the image and that search engines use to understand what the picture shows.
Canonical URL
A canonical URL is the version of a page you tell search engines to treat as the main one when the same or similar content can be reached through several different URLs. It points them to the copy you want indexed and ranked.
Core Web Vitals
Core Web Vitals are three Google metrics that measure how a page actually feels to use: how fast the main content loads, how quickly the page responds when you interact with it, and how much the layout jumps around while loading.
Crawl budget
Crawl budget is how many of your pages a search engine is willing to crawl in a given period. It's shaped by how fast and reliably your server responds and by how much the engine thinks your pages are worth revisiting.
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