Backlinks are synonymous with what one calls off-site SEO, and are often regarded as an ultimate measure to get to high rankings. Contrary to that, Google actually claims that the importance of backlinks has not been this huge as in the past, especially in the past couple of years. And while buying backlinks should be a no-no, it’s still widely practiced.

There’s a lot of chatter going on around the importance of backlinks and how to built the best backlink profile. For example – will a high quantity of lower quality backlinks be on par with a lower quantity of high quality backlinks? This is one of the questions that was posed to John Mueller, the Search Advocate.

According to Mueller, you can literally get millions of backlinks and they will be ignored as long as they don’t have a quality and credible source. If you, however, get a high authority back link, such as from a homepage of a news site, this will have impact. In short – quantity should have very little impact as long as the links aren’t high authority, and relevant.

This is an important thing to remember in 2021, while backlinks are the bread and butter of off-site SEO, it’s more important than ever that they are relevant, come from relevant, reliable pages with a similar themed content.