SEO and Backlinks - Overview of Backlinks (Part 1)
Backlinks - What are they and why are they important?
In the world of SEO, we often hear terms about backlinks like link building, link exchange, and link baiting. But what are backlinks and why are they so important?
Backlinks are links to your website from another site. And the reason they are so important in search engine optimization is because search engines use these links to determine where to place your website in its search results.
Google’s core innovation is the use of backlinks as a way to determine what search results to display. In fact, this is so core to Google’s algorithm that the original nickname for the search engine was “backrub.”
Other major search engines have followed Google’s lead by incorporating backlinks into their algorithms as well. Today, a key part of any SEO effort is to engage in link building.
Backlinks: Votes across the Web
Search engines use links in many different ways. One of the key analysis they perform is to examine the “anchor text” – or the text next to the link to your site. Their algorithms use this to determine when they should display your site in the search results.
Picture a voting system where links act as votes. If someone adds links to your site, the search engine records this as a vote for your site. Next to the link, let’s say they put the words “ultimate guide to ice cream” This anchor text lets determines the scope of the vote. So when someone searches for “ultimate guide to ice cream” the search engine can provide a list of all the sites that has links with “ultimate guide to ice cream” and list them by the number of votes. Therefore, having the right anchor text is a critical part of successful link building.
Not all votes are created equal
Another important consideration is the quality of the site that links to you. If the search engines only relied on the number of links with the anchor text, people could simply create a lot of sites with the sole purpose of placing “phony” links.
The search engines prevent this problem by looking at the quality or authority (Google PageRank is a famous ranking that is used by Google) of the linking site. Links from higher authority sites count more – and are also harder to manipulate. Other quality factors that search engines look at include the age of the linking page, the number of backlinks to the linking page.
Evolution of Link Analysis
Over time, as the SEO industry has gotten more sophisticated about link building (and link buying), the search engines have also grown more sophisticated in their link analysis. Search engines now also take into account factors such as link distribution and basic semantic analysis (i.e. topic of the linking and linked site).
In our next post, we will look at the common link building techniques.
