How Many Backlinks Does A Website Need to Rank on Google?

Many new digital marketers ask “How many backlinks should a website have to rank number one in Google?”.

Our SEO team recently performed a study where we analyzed over 150,000 domains ranking first on Google search results in hundreds of different niches.

Our results are broken down by industry to help you understand how many backlinks are needed to rank in Google.

We hope you like our findings on the backlinks needed to improve rankings.

Backlinks Needed By Industry

Here are our findings on the number of backlinks needed broken down by industry.

A backlink is defined as an inbound link with an Ahrefs Domain Rating above DR30.

Only do-follow backlinks were counted in this study.

How many backlinks does a website need to rank on the first page of the Google search results?

From our studies, the average number of backlinks a website needed to rank on the first page of the Google search results was 205.

The average of 204 backlinks to rank in the top 10 of Google SERP is based on UK search results.

How many backlinks does a website need to rank in the top 3 of Google search results?

From our studies, the average number of backlinks a website needed to rank in the top 3 positions of the Google search results was 528.

The average of 528 backlinks to rank in the top 3 of Google SERP is based on UK search results.

How many backlinks does a site have?

In order to know how many backlinks a site has you need to use one of the following tools:

• Google Search Console – this is if you own the website
• AhRefs – third party tool that crawls the internet to find all backlinks
• Semrush – SEO tool to help provide website data
• Link Research Tools – scrapes and scores all backlinks

Is 1000 backlinks good?

1000 backlinks to a website are above average.

It’s better to get 100 backlinks from 100 different referring domains than 1,000 links from the same website.

Our latest ranking case study showed it was more important to look at the number of RD’s linking to you as opposed to the quantity of backlinks.

Are too many backlinks bad?

Backlinks are an essential part of off-site SEO and help your website gain trust and power.

If blog owners are purchasing spammy backlinks using low-quality link-building strategies, this can cause sudden ranking drops.

Here are some examples where too many backlinks can be bad:

• Having too many exact-match anchor text backlinks is bad
• Having too many toxic backlinks can harm rankings
• Having too many links from a bad-link neighborhood is bad
• Having too many non-relevant links is bad

Earning powerful, relevant backlinks from web pages that get traffic is the key to success.

Does A Backlink’s Domain Rating and DA Matter?

Not all backlinks have the same value.

Third-party tools like Moz and Ahrefs have predicted the power of backlinks with DA (domain authority) and DR (domain rank).

Here are some details about the power of backlinks:

• DR30 backlink provides good value
• DR45 backlink provides very good value
• DR60 backlink provides amazing value

The caveat to this is DR can be manipulated so always check the power, traffic, and relevance of backlinks you are looking to acquire.

Summary

A website should have 40 to 50 backlinks to the homepage to build trust.

Then 3-5 backlinks to each individual web page are needed to be competitive for SEO.

The PageRank scores of those backlinks are important because the higher their value, the fewer links are needed to boost overall rankings.

Some SEOs in the communities use the word “link juice” to describe page rank.

James Dooley

Entrepreneur

James Dooley is a British entrepreneur, SEO, investor, and philanthropist. James has built a huge Search Engine Optimization team that focus on organic SEO endeavours, including affiliate marketing, lead generation, as well as SEO services.