Does backlinks really help ranking?

[alexandra]

one of my site has ten times of backlinks than competitor`s, however my site do not get good ranking than competitor`s, what is the problem?

[DoppyNL]

It's not only about the amount of backlinks you've got but also about:

- quality of backlink (a related site will help more then an unrelated site)
- Quality of your content
- crawler-friendlyness of your site

Take a look at your competitors site through the eyes of a visitor; Might help you improve your own site.

[Robert Charlton]

Does backlinks really help ranking?

Yes, it's one of the main factors, particularly in competitive searches (and they're all becoming competitive).

It's important, though, that your page be relevant to the search query. A page that might rank well for red widgets might not rank well for green gizmos.

It also helps if the links are relevant to the query. Also, as Doppy points out, some links have higher quality than other links. The PageRank of the linking page, the number links on the page, the anchor text content and the content of the link in relation to the page it's linking to, the IP separation of the linking pages, etc etc etc are all factors just in regard to links.

And there are roughly a hundred factors not related to linking that Google also considers in ranking a page. But links are one of the most important.