How Search Engines Use Backlinks to Determine a Website’s Importance/Popularity
You may know that backlinks are important for an SEO campaign, but what you might not know is why exactly backlinks are significant. In order to understand this, first accept this basic truth: everything that is considered searchable on the Internet is dependent on internal and external links. If not for the search engine all we would have is direct web addresses and bookmarks—basically an offline campaign.
How Backlinking Determines Popularity
However, search engines make it possible for us to find one another online and to find pages and businesses that meet our needs. Internal linking and external linking help crawlers to locate new pages, discover new content, and index them for search engines. Ideally, companies and authors want their pages and sites to be “high ranked” for popular keywords, so that they can easily reach a targeted audience online.
Factors considered include many aspects such as traffic, quality writing, domain name and page names, META information and linking structure. Incoming links, or inbound links, were formerly important in web navigation, however, major search engines today now realize that link popularity (as in the total number of links and the quality of said links) is a major statement as to how relevant a website really is for a specific subject matter.
Google has stated such when explaining their PageRank system. They interpret links from Page 1 to Page 2 (for example) as a “vote”. Of course, many SPAM doers take advantage of this by creating “link spam”, which is basically multiple but irrelevant pages of inbound links. Google, Yahoo and Bing are now developing ways to combat poor quality links and discount quantity in favor or quality.
Search Engines Are Evaluating Your Content!
In the modern age, SEO experts and webmasters are having to think ahead of the industry and find new ways to create a high number of quality backlinks that search engines will accept as “relevant” links. For instance, linkbaiting is a common practice, as is article marketing on “authoritative sites”, blog commenting, social media interaction and forum posting.
Of course, the search engines are wise to the many tactics out there, both honest and dishonest, and are constantly developing ways to detect if content is actually geared towards the keyword topic and the links. In addition to content matching from site 1 to site 2, anchor text is another very relevant issue. This is the descriptive link text that explains the content available on the new site, and the text that will be evaluated by search engine bots.
One of the most talked about trends in SEO today is how search engines are now weighing the quantity of inbound links with link popularity and originating context. Interestingly, (and contrary to what you might think) major search sites like Google only show a small number of links pointing to a popular site. However, it considers ALL backlinks before making its ranking decisions.
This is nothing to be afraid of. In fact, accurately drawing attention to sourced material is a common journalistic standard. All that’s really happening here is that the net is becoming professionalized, and online writing is increasing in quality!
