Backlinks

Backlinks are the reverse side of links. When page A links to page B, page B gets an automatic backlink to page A. Grafos tracks these bidirectional connections and displays them on every page.

What Are Backlinks?

In a traditional website, links are one-directional. You click a link on page A and it takes you to page B. But page B has no knowledge that page A pointed to it.

Backlinks flip this relationship. Grafos scans all wikilinks and standard markdown links during the pre-build step and records every connection in graph.json. When rendering a page, Grafos reads the graph data to find all pages that link to the current page and displays them as a backlinks panel.

This is the same concept used in tools like Obsidian, Roam Research, and Notion. It turns your content into a bidirectional web where every page knows both what it links to and what links to it.

Backlinks are valuable for several reasons:

• Discoverability — readers find related pages they might not have navigated to otherwise
• Context — seeing which pages reference the current page reveals its role in the broader knowledge structure
• Maintenance — authors can see how a page is used across the site and update references when content changes

Display

Backlinks are displayed as a list at the bottom of each content page, below the main content and above the prev/next navigation. Each backlink entry shows:

• The title of the linking page
• A short excerpt showing the context in which the link appears

Clicking a backlink navigates to the linking page. The excerpt gives readers enough context to decide whether the linked page is relevant before clicking.

The backlinks panel is only shown when a page has at least one backlink. Pages with no incoming links show no backlinks section.

The backlinks data comes from the same graph.json that powers the graph visualization. The graph stores edges as { source, target } pairs. To find backlinks for a page, Grafos filters for all edges where target matches the current page slug and returns the corresponding source pages.

Configuration

Backlinks are enabled by default. You can disable them in configuration:

features: {
  backlinks: true, // Set to false to hide the backlinks panel
}

When backlinks are disabled, the panel is hidden from all pages. The underlying link data is still recorded in graph.json because the graph feature depends on it.

Individual pages cannot opt out of showing backlinks. The setting is global. If you want to hide backlinks from a specific page, you can use a custom layout for that page that does not include the backlinks component.

The backlinks component is available for custom placement if you want to move it from its default position:

import { Backlinks } from 'grafos/components'

export default function CustomPage({ slug }) {
  return (
    <article>
      {/* Your content */}
      <aside>
        <Backlinks slug={slug} />
      </aside>
    </article>
  )
}