Search engines essentially like to use two types of links to decide the ranking of a website. The first is the type of links that help discover new content and the second is the kind of links that help the search engine rank a web page. This decision is made after the web pages are crawled and the content on those pages is extracted to be indexed.

When the search engine is satisfied because the linking meets the above-mentioned criteria and has the right set of keywords, it is ready to rank the page. As we now know, the decision is not just limited to the content of the page. 

It looks at the links from external websites and judges the value of those websites to decide the worth of your website. As you manage to get more links from high-value websites, your website’s chances of being ranked higher on the search engine results page increase. 

But if you are not careful and practice over-linking, Google is very likely to penalize you for over-optimization. On the other hand, if you engage in low-quality link building, it is a waste of your time because if the websites linking back to your content are not of high value, it makes no difference to your website’s chances of getting ranked high. So what you need to do is to find a sensible balance between the number of backlinks and the quality of those who are linking back to you. And let’s not forget that high-quality backlinks are also likely to drive a lot of traffic to your website.