If you’ve been working on your website’s SEO, you probably think ranking higher on Google is always a good thing. But what if we told you that some rankings—despite looking good on paper—might actually be hurting your site’s long-term performance?
Welcome to the paradox of SEO in 2025: vanity rankings, cheap backlinks, and bad link-building tactics that do more harm than good.
In this post, we’ll explain how you can tell if your rankings are misleading, what to do about them, and why the quality of your backlinks is often the hidden culprit. Spoiler: if you’ve never heard of backlinks before, now’s the time to care.
Let’s say you’ve got a few keywords ranking on page one. Nice work. But are they actually doing anything?
“A ranking without relevance is like a billboard in the middle of the desert,” says Darryl Hoffman, Link Building Specialist at BacklinksMy.Website. “It looks impressive until you realise no one’s actually seeing it—or worse, it’s attracting the wrong crowd.”
In 2025, Google’s algorithm is smarter than ever. It’s not just tracking what you rank for, but why and how you got there. That’s where backlinks come into play.
A backlink is when another website links to yours. Think of it as a vote of confidence from the internet.
But not all votes are created equal. Some are from trustworthy, high-authority sources—like newspapers, journals, and reputable blogs. Others? Not so much. Think link farms, irrelevant directories, or paid links from dodgy sites.
Google can tell the difference. And in 2025, it’s ruthless about penalising low-quality backlink profiles.
“We still see businesses spending money on spammy backlink packages promising 1,000 links for $50,” says Hoffman. “Those links might boost you temporarily—but you’ll crash just as fast. Or worse, you’ll get slapped with a manual penalty that’s painful to recover from.”
If any of the following sound familiar, your backlink strategy (or lack thereof) might be the silent killer:
If you’re nodding uncomfortably right now, don’t panic. There’s a fix.
The solution isn’t just more links. It’s better links.
You need backlinks from:
At BacklinksMy.Website, this is all we do.
Our team builds genuine relationships with publishers and journalists to place your business where it naturally fits—whether that’s a piece in a major tech blog, a local industry journal, or a niche authority site.
“Every backlink we build is manually obtained, vetted, and placed with long-term SEO in mind,” says Hoffman. “We don’t chase numbers. We chase trust.”
Google’s ranking factors change every year, but one thing stays the same: trust. And that trust is earned through a combination of on-site quality, user experience, and—you guessed it—credible backlinks.
In fact, multiple studies confirm that backlinks remain one of the top-ranking factors in Google’s algorithm. But not just any backlinks.
Google rewards effort, editorial discretion, and authenticity. That’s why automated link-building tools and PBNs (private blog networks) are slowly becoming obsolete.
If you’re not sure whether your backlinks are helping or hurting, here’s where to start:
And if you want help, well—we know a good place to start: BacklinksMy.Website.
SEO in 2025 isn’t just about getting to the top of Google—it’s about staying there. If your rankings look good but your traffic is flat, your conversions are low, or your site is constantly dancing around in search results, it’s time to ask the hard question:
Are your rankings actually hurting your rankings?
Chances are, the answer lies in your backlinks.
As Hoffman puts it:
“You don’t need 10,000 links. You need 10 great ones in the right places.”
And that’s exactly what we do at BacklinksMy.Website.