Understanding Backlinks

Inbound and Outbound Links

The links on a site represent the relationships that site has with other sites. A site with no incoming links or outgoing links will have receive no organic traffic – ever. Even if you have the most valuable content on the internet published on your site, if you have no incoming links, you’ll never receive traffic because there is no way for other sites to find you.

Outgoing links are a resource for your readers.  Linking to your sources is important for at least four reasons: verifiability, acknowledgment, examples, context. However, having only outgoing links is not a good thing either. What a site needs is to have a balance of both incoming links and outgoing links.

Organic Traffic: Organic traffic is any traffic that comes to your site without being paid for. This includes people who visit via links in forums and blogs, traffic from search engines, traffic from word of mouth, or traffic from bookmarks. Organic traffic generally comes to a site naturally and is not driven by marketing campaigns.

Inorganic Traffic: Inorganic traffic is traffic that is pushed via marketing campaigns. Banner ads, search engine ads, etc generate inorganic traffic. Generally speaking this form of traffic is semi-immediate depending on how much you blanket the Web with your advertising and slowly dies out over time unless more money is spent to build a new marketing campaign.

What is a Backlink?
Backlinks are incoming links to a website. A backlink is created when another site or a blog links back to your site, or a post on it and the value of that backlink is related to the PR ( pagerank) of the site linking back to yours. A site with a lot of backlinks implies that many other sites link to that site ie. popularity. A site with a lot of backlinks from authoratative sites in the same niche impiles your blog is growing in authority within the niche.

The importance of backlinks
If you want high search engine rankings so your blog will receive more organic traffic it’s important to have backlinks. Google ranks your site from 0 to 10 based in part on the PR of sites that link to yours.  If you have backlinks from high PR sites then Google will rank your site higher in search engines results, and as your site gets more backlinks Google will see your site as one of increasing importance. This will be reflected in your blog’s PR.  The more quality backlinks your site has the higher your Google page rank will be. Therefore improving your Google page rank is important.

Quality, quantity and relevance of backlinks
Search engines consider content of the sites to determine the quality of a link. When incoming links from other sites with content related to your site, they are considered to be more relevant to your site than those coming from site with unrelated content. When search engines calculate the relevance of a site to a keyword, they consider the number of quality incoming links to that site. The higher the relevance of incoming links the greater their quality will be.

A backlink could be considered as a quality backlink if:

• The content of the backlinking site is the related to your same as your website.
• It links to your website with the keyword (keyphrase) that you are trying to optimize for.

Note: Google’s policy strongly opposes buying/selling links and hence purchase and sales of backlinks is violation of terms of Google.

Backlink checkers
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, and more.

There are several other online backlink checkers that you can use. Here are two:

backlinkwatch.com- How to use this tool

1. Type URL of your site to get complete detailed information about quality and quantity of backlinks pointing to your site.
2. It will show you “anchor” text, pagerank, total outbound links on that page, and nofollow flag for each of your incoming link available.

iwebtool.com – How to use this tool

1. Enter the exact site address of the page you want to check the backlinks for into the text box.
2. Click the “Check!” button.
3. The results will be shown in a table, 20 results per page will be displayed.
4. Click the + icon to view more details about the website.

Backlink Building

• A tool to help you with your backlink building is the Backlink Builder Tool.This tool searches for websites that have a related theme to your website which are likely to add your link to their website.
• A good tool for helping you find your backlinks and what text is being used to link to your site is the Backlink Anchor Text Analysis Tool. If you find the anchor text at a site linking to yours is not being properly used, you ought to request the anchor text be corrected to incorporate relevant keywords.  The result of the correction  will help boost your quality backlinks score.
• Another way to gain quality backlinks to your site is selecting appropriate anchor text. When a link incorporates a keyword into the text of the hyperlink, this is quality anchor text.
• There are many webmasters who purchases lot of links very quickly and wants their site to get listed on 1st place for highly competitive keywords from the day of launch.

…if the content of a document changes such that it differs significantly from the anchor text associated with its back links, then the domain associated with the document may have changed significantly (completely) from a previous incarnation. This may occur when a domain expires and a different party purchases the domain… All links and/or anchor text prior to that date may then be ignored or discounted. This extract has the following core messages:

• It’s best to build backlinks slowly to avoid penalties.
• Sites that generate a huge number of backlinks very quickly can be considered as spam in some cases.
• All previous backlinks are ignored on sites where the topic of the site has changed significantly.

Link farms
Search engine criteria for quality inbound links has become increasingly tougher due to unscrupulous webmasters trying to achieve  incoming links by deceptive techniques, like hidden links, or automatically generated pages designed solely to provide incoming links to websites. These pages are called link farms; they are disregarded by search engines, and linking to a link farm can result in your site being banned entirely.

Bad Neighborhood link checker
Text Link Checker Tool

References:
The Importance of Backlinks
WordPress and SEO Tips and Techniques
10 Tips For Getting Backlinks
Top Ten Tips for Getting Backlinks to Your Website
Understanding Reciprocal and Non-Reciprocal Links

Related posts found in this blog:

How to Become a Better Blogger 3: Ethics and Links
Natural Linking Strategy for Bloggers
How backlinks will make Google your blog’s best friend
WordPress: How to maintain and track links

 

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