backlinks

When doing a search on how to increase traffic to your website, you would have come across the term backlinks quite often. Backlinks generally refer to links placed on other websites that point to pages on your website.

Because they are important?

So what kind of importance are backlinks to your website? Google’s rise to current dominance, and the reason most of its competitors were left behind when there were dozens of popular search engines, was its proprietary PageRank algorithm.

What PageRank did differently than other search engines at the time was the way it ranked search results. The most common way to rank a site in the past was to look at the keywords present and how strongly they related to your search query. However, this means that a spammy website can easily fill your website with popular search terms so that your pages rank high in search results that are not relevant to your content.

PageRank introduced a different metric to measure a website’s relevance to search queries. Google takes each backlink you get from another website as a “vote” that your website contains enough relevant and desirable information for the other website to consider it worth linking to. By doing so, Goggle reduced the reliance on the keywords present on a website to determine how high it ranks. At the same time, it encourages site owners to develop quality content instead of stuffing their pages with keywords.

Backlink Quality

Every time you place a link to another website on your own site, you are actually giving that link your vote. It is important to note that if your website contains links to sites that Google considers spam and questionable, it will affect your PageRank. The same thing happens when links to your website appear very frequently on dubious websites. This works with the logic that if you are in bad company, it is very likely that you are too.

While having bank links is important, getting quality links is even more vital. In February 2003, Google received its first patent granted for the methodology of giving more weight to links from authoritative websites. A few links from a group of reputable websites works much more in your favor than having hundreds of links from a low-ranking, quality site.

How can you get backlinks?

Getting desirable backlinks from another website is a tedious process. Websites in the past used to have a links or resources page just to list websites that the website owner thinks you will find interesting. You can email websites with similar content to place a link on their website and it would reciprocate. As websites changed, links and resource pages became more and more redundant because the links were embedded in the content itself wherever they fit the context.

When blogging came on the scene, anyone with internet access could post and manage content online without any programming knowledge. With an increasing amount of content created on the internet in the form of articles or posts, the practice of linking interesting bits of information in these posts became even more prevalent. This is where it’s easiest to get backlinks: writing interesting articles or posts that people want to read and, in turn, share with others. Every time your articles are republished or shared on other’s blogs, you automatically get backlinks without much effort beyond writing the article itself. At the same time, you’re also driving traffic to your site, so there’s really no reason not to when possible.

Conclusion

While Google has since added over 200 other criteria on which it ranks a website, backlinks are still a key component in establishing your site in search results. An entire industry offering search engine optimization was even created to help clients increase their search traffic by building quality backlinks. Google’s search engine is constantly being refined and updated as its engineers discover new ways to link information to your queries. What works to drive search traffic today may not work a few months from now. However, with PageRank being the core innovation that helped propel Google to the position it enjoys today, it’s most likely here to stay for a long time.