When a page on Site A links to a page on Site B, Site B has received a backlink from Site A. Search engines treat backlinks as votes of confidence — a page with many high-quality backlinks tends to rank higher than a page with few or none.
Not all backlinks carry equal weight. A link from an authoritative, topically relevant site passes more value than a link from a low-quality or unrelated site. Links with rel="nofollow", rel="ugc", or rel="sponsored" pass reduced or no PageRank.
What SearchVitals tracks: The Backlinks module shows total backlinks, referring domains, anchor text distribution, and link health — highlighting lost links, toxic-looking domains, and pages with no inbound links.
Key metric: Referring domains (unique sites linking to you) is generally more meaningful than raw backlink count, because thousands of links from one site count far less than links from thousands of different sites.