You will be able to explain how Google uses links and why relevance and trust matter more than link counts.
Two tuition centres in the same part of Singapore have websites of similar quality. One has been mentioned and linked by its neighbourhood's community centre page, a parenting site that reviewed it, the primary school PTA newsletter and a local news story about tuition costs. The other has a few hundred links from overseas directories it has never heard of, bought as a package. If you had to guess which one Google trusts more, you would probably guess right.
Links have been part of how Google works since the beginning, and they still are. But the way they matter is often misunderstood. This lesson covers what Google says links do, why some links count for much more than others, and why mentions without links matter too.
Google uses links in two broad ways. The first is discovery. Lesson 1.1 explained that Googlebot finds new pages mainly by following links. A link to your page from another site is one more route by which Google can find it.
The second is understanding and ranking. A link from one page to another says something about how they relate, and Google uses that as one signal of which pages are worth showing. Google's guide to its ranking systems lists PageRank, the system its founders developed to understand how pages link to each other, as one of its ranking systems. Google describes it as one system among many, and it has changed a great deal since the early days.
The words of a link matter too. Lesson 3.3, Internal links, images and URLs, introduced anchor text for links within your own site. The same applies to links from other sites. Google's link best practices explain that anchor text helps Google understand what the linked page is about. When a parenting site links to Priya's heuristics guide with the words "a clear guide to PSLE heuristics from a Tampines maths teacher", that tells Google and readers what to expect.
Google does not publish how much any link is worth. What it does say, through its spam policies and documentation, makes the general shape clear: links that reflect real recommendations are what the system is built to reward, and links created to manipulate rankings are what its spam policies target.
That is why a link from a relevant, trusted site in your field or area usually means more than many links from unrelated sites. The community centre page, the PTA newsletter and the parenting review all come from sources with a real connection to parents of primary school children in that area. Each one was given because someone thought the centre worth mentioning. A few hundred links from unrelated overseas directories carry none of that meaning, and if they were bought, they breach Google's link spam policy, which lesson 6.2, Link practices that breach Google's policies, covers in detail.
For a small business, this is good news. You do not need thousands of links. A handful of genuine links from sites your customers already know and trust is a realistic goal and a meaningful one.
Not every reference to your business includes a link. A news story may name Priya's centre without linking to it. A parent on a forum may recommend Mei Ling's cakes by name. A directory may list your business with your address and phone number but no website.
Google has not published that it treats unlinked mentions as a ranking signal, so do not count on them for that. They still matter in other ways. People read them and come to recognise your name, and some will search for it directly. Google's guidance on local results, covered in module 7, says prominence is based partly on information Google has about a business from across the web, such as links, articles and directories. And AI assistants, covered in module 8, build their answers from pages that mention businesses, whether or not those pages link.
So keep track of where your business is mentioned as well as where it is linked. A mention without a link is also an opportunity, as lesson 6.3, Ways a small business earns links, will show.
Google Search Console has a Links report. It shows the sites that link to your site most, your pages that receive the most links from other sites, and the anchor text used. It is free and it comes from Google's own data, although it is a sample and does not list every link.
Paid tools such as Ahrefs or Semrush run their own crawlers and keep their own link databases. They can show links Search Console does not, and they let you look at competitors' links, which Search Console cannot. Their figures and authority scores are their own estimates, like the keyword difficulty scores from lesson 2.3, Keyword tools and how far to trust their numbers, and they do not reflect anything Google publishes.
When Priya opened her Links report, the top linking sites were her old web designer's portfolio, two overseas directories she did not recognise, a parenting forum thread and the neighbourhood community club page where she had run a free workshop. Only the last two had any real connection to her customers.
Open your Links report, or one of the paid tools if you use one, and list the sites that link to you most. The activity below asks you to judge each one as relevant or not.
Use Search Console's Links report, or a tool such as Ahrefs or Semrush, to list the ten sites linking to you most and judge each as relevant or not.
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