What are “backlinks”? Backlinks are
links that are directed towards your website. Also knows as Inbound
links (IBL’s). The number of backlinks is an indication of the
popularity or importance of that website. Backlinks are
important for SEO because some search engines, especially Google, will
give more credit to websites that have a good number of quality
backlinks, and consider those websites more relevant than others in
their results pages for a search query.
When search engines calculate the relevance of a site
to a keyword, they consider the number of QUALITY inbound links to that
site. So we should not be satisfied with merely getting inbound links,
it is the quality of the inbound link that matters.
A search engine considers the content of the sites to determine the QUALITY of a link. When inbound links to your site come from other sites, and those sites have content related to your site, these inbound links are considered more relevant to your site. If inbound links are found on sites with unrelated content, they are considered less relevant. The higher the relevance of inbound links, the greater their quality.
A search engine considers the content of the sites to determine the QUALITY of a link. When inbound links to your site come from other sites, and those sites have content related to your site, these inbound links are considered more relevant to your site. If inbound links are found on sites with unrelated content, they are considered less relevant. The higher the relevance of inbound links, the greater their quality.
For example, if a webmaster has a website about how to rescue orphaned kittens, and received a backlink from
another website about kittens, then that would be more relevant in a
search engine’s assessment than say a link from a site about car racing.
The more relevant the site is that is linking back to your website, the
better the quality of the backlink.
Search engines want websites to have a level playing
field, and look for natural links built slowly over time. While it is
fairly easy to manipulate links on a web page to try to achieve a higher
ranking, it is a lot harder to influence a search engine with external backlinks from other websites. This is also a reason why backlinks factor
in so highly into a search engine’s algorithm. Lately, however, a
search engine’s criteria for quality inbound links has gotten even
tougher, thanks to unscrupulous webmasters trying to achieve these
inbound links by deceptive or sneaky techniques, such as with hidden
links, or automatically generated pages whose sole purpose is to provide
inbound links to websites. These pages are called link farms, and they
are not only disregarded by search engines, but linking to a link farm
could get your site banned entirely.
Another reason to achieve quality backlinks is to
entice visitors to come to your website. You can’t build a website, and
then expect that people will find your website without pointing the way.
You will probably have to get the word out there about your site. One
way webmasters got the word out used to be through reciprocal linking.
Let’s talk about reciprocal linking for a moment.
There is much discussion in these last few months
about reciprocal linking. In the last Google update, reciprocal links
were one of the targets of the search engine’s latest filter. Many
webmasters had agreed upon reciprocal link exchanges, in order to boost
their site’s rankings with the sheer number of inbound links. In a link
exchange, one webmaster places a link on his website that points to
another webmasters website, and vice versa. Many of these links were
simply not relevant, and were just discounted. So while the irrelevant
inbound link was ignored, the outbound links still got counted, diluting
the relevancy score of many websites. This caused a great many websites
to drop off the Google map.
We must be careful with our reciprocal links. There
is a Google patent in the works that will deal with not only the
popularity of the sites being linked to, but also how trustworthy a site
is that you link to from your own website. This will mean that you
could get into trouble with the search engine just for linking to a bad
apple. We could begin preparing for this future change in the search
engine algorithm by being choosier with which we exchange links right
now. By choosing only relevant sites to link with, and sites that don’t
have tons of outbound links on a page, or sites that don’t practice
black-hat SEO techniques, we will have a better chance that our
reciprocal links won’t be discounted.
Many webmasters have more than one website. Sometimes
these websites are related, sometimes they are not. You have to also be
careful about interlinking multiple websites on the same IP. If you own
seven related websites, then a link to each of those websites on a page
could hurt you, as it may look like to a search engine that you are
trying to do something fishy. Many webmasters have tried to manipulate backlinks in this way; and too many links to sites with the same IP address is referred to as backlink bombing.
One thing is certain: interlinking sites doesn’t help
you from a search engine standpoint. The only reason you may want to
interlink your sites in the first place might be to provide your
visitors with extra resources to visit. In this case, it would probably
be okay to provide visitors with a link to another of your websites, but
try to keep many instances of linking to the same IP address to a bare
minimum. One or two links on a page here and there probably won’t hurt
you.
There are a few things to consider when beginning
your backlink building campaign. It is helpful to keep track of your
backlinks, to know which sites are linking back to you, and how the
anchor text of the backlink incorporates keywords relating to your site.
A tool to help you keep track of your backlinks is the Domain Stats
Tool. This tool displays the backlinks of a domain in Google, Yahoo, and
MSN. It will also tell you a few other details about your website, like
your listings in the Open Directory, or DMOZ, from which Google regards
backlinks highly important; Alexa traffic rank, and how many pages from
your site that have been indexed, to name just a few.
