Backlinks in Obsidian are incoming links from other notes in your vault that point to the note you're currently viewing. When you create a link using [[Note Name]] syntax in Obsidian, that creates a forward link to another note. The backlink is the reverse—it appears automatically in the target note showing where it's been referenced. You'll find backlinks in the right sidebar of Obsidian under the backlinks pane. If you're in Note A and five other notes link to it, you'll see all five listed there with context snippets showing the surrounding text. This makes Obsidian bidirectional by default—you don't need to manually maintain reverse links. Backlinks matter because they reveal emergent connections in your knowledge base. You might create a note about "content strategy" and later discover through backlinks that you've referenced it in twelve different project notes, signaling it's a core concept worth expanding. This mirrors how we think about backlinks in SEO—inbound references signal authority and relevance. Obsidian also shows unlinked mentions, which are instances where you typed the exact note title but didn't use bracket syntax. These appear below backlinks and let you convert plain text into proper links retroactively. At Ottawa SEO, we use Obsidian internally for technical SEO documentation and client strategy notes. The backlink feature helps us see how different tactics connect across projects—for example, seeing which client sites we've recommended schema markup for, all from the schema note's backlinks. It's faster than grep and more visual than folder hierarchies. The graph view visualizes these backlink relationships as nodes and edges, though on a 500+ note vault it gets messy fast. Most practical use comes from the sidebar pane during actual writing and research, not the pretty but chaotic graph. Backlinks work locally in your Obsidian vault—they're not web backlinks and don't affect SEO. But the concept translates well: both rely on reference patterns to surface what matters.