What are backlinks? A beginner's guide for startup founders

If you are a founder trying to get your startup's landing page to show up on Google, you have probably been told that you need to "build backlinks." But if you don't come from an SEO or marketing background, the concept can seem overly technical.

Backlinks are simple. This guide covers what a backlink is, why search engines rely on them so heavily, and how you can start acquiring them for your own website.

A backlink is simply a link from one website to another website. That's it.

For example, if TechCrunch writes an article about your new startup and includes a hyperlink pointing to your homepage, you have just earned a backlink from TechCrunch. If you submit your product to a startup directory like Product Hunt and they publish a listing that links to your site, that is also a backlink.

To understand why backlinks matter, you have to understand how Google's algorithm was originally built.

In the late 1990s, search engines ranked websites based almost entirely on how many times a keyword appeared on the page. This was easy to manipulate. Google's founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, changed search by treating a link as a "vote of confidence."

The logic is simple: if nobody is linking to your website, it's probably not very important. But if dozens of authoritative, trustworthy websites (like major news outlets, universities, or large software directories) link to your website, your website must be worth visiting.

Today, the quality and quantity of your backlinks remain one of the top three ranking factors in Google's algorithm.

Google does not treat all "votes" equally.

A backlink from a brand new, unknown blog with zero traffic is worth very little. A backlink from a globally recognized site like Wikipedia or Crunchbase is worth an enormous amount.

SEOs use a metric called "Domain Rating" (DR) or "Domain Authority" (DA) on a scale of 0 to 100 to estimate how powerful a website's "vote" is. When a site with a DR of 90 links to you, it passes a significant amount of "link equity" (or "link juice") to your domain, signaling to Google that your site should rank higher.

There is a technical caveat to backlinks. A website can add a snippet of code to a link (rel="nofollow") that tells Google: "I am linking to this website, but I do not vouch for it, so do not pass any of my authority to it."

Links from social media (Twitter, LinkedIn, Reddit) are almost always nofollow. They are great for driving actual human traffic, but they do not pass SEO authority.

Standard, unmodified links are called "dofollow" links. These are the ones that pass SEO authority and help you rank higher.

Earning backlinks naturally (like getting covered by the press) is incredibly difficult when you first launch. Your domain authority is 0, and nobody knows who you are.

This is why startup directory submissions are a foundational SEO strategy. By submitting your product to high-authority directories like Product Hunt, Crunchbase, and G2, you can proactively acquire your first 30 to 50 dofollow backlinks. That builds your initial domain authority and pulls your site out of the "Google Sandbox," so your content can start ranking in search results. It also helps you increase your Domain Rating over time.