Bidirectional links are connections that can be seen and followed from both documents they join; a backlink is the view from the receiving end, a list of the notes or pages that link to the current one.
In a survey of Project Xanadu's structure, 📝Ted Nelson argues that serious electronic literature needs bidirectional, profuse links stored outside the documents they connect, which he says HTML links cannot provide. Those links pair with the visible re-use of content described in the sibling entry 📝Transclusion / Block References.
In note-taking tools, backlinks are computed rather than written. The Backlinks plugin in 📝Obsidian lists linked mentions, the notes containing an internal link to the active note, and unlinked mentions, where the note's name appears without a link. Apps in the 📝Networked Thought lineage, such as 📝Reflect, are built around daily notes and backlinks.
In 📝MythOS, every @ mention is recorded as a backlink on the memo it points to, and the 📝Backlinks panel beneath a memo shows its creator every memo that mentions it.
In search engine optimization the word means something else: 📝Google Search Console Help defines a backlink as a link on a page from another site to a page on your site.
Reflect was my daily journal from April 2022 to mid-2025: more than eight hundred entries backlinked to the people, companies and ideas in my life. I migrated that whole graph into MythOS, where it now lives as my daily memos.