What Are Backlinks And Why Are They Important To Every Blog And Website?

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Let me clarify the title a little bit. What are backlinks and why are they important to every blog or website that wants to be successful?

To start let me give a little more insight into what a backlink is.

For starters, backlinks go by many other different names like backward links, incoming links, inbound links, and inlinks.

A backlink is a link from another site, whether it be a blog or a website, that has a link somewhere on their site that is pointing to your site. These sites can be any kind of website, link directories, or blog. Basically, search engines, like Google, will use this information, among other factors, to determine how popular and/or important your website is. When Google determines your value, it will assign you a PageRank on a scale of 1 to 10. The process of obtaining these links, or link building, is a key process in SEO or, search engine optimization.

More Important Info About Backlinks…

Don’t get caught up in getting as many backlinks as fast as you can. A common mistake is assuming that Google will give you higher PageRank according to the quantity of backlinks you have. Actually, what Google really cares about is the QUALITY of backlinks you have. The idea here is to get links on websites or blogs that have high PageRank in a niche or topic that is similar to yours. Not just random websites.

When you are in the link building process, I would suggest that you stay away from most link directories. There are very few that I would recommend you submit to but one of them is DMOZ.org, also known as the Open Directory Project. The reason for this is simple. Although DMOZ.org looks very similar to most link directories, it’s not. Hundreds of of websites across the globe use the data in DMOZ provides and links to it including, that’s right, GOOGLE! Google actually uses DMOZ to power it’s own directory. So when you get your site is submitted into DMOZ, which may take a while, you actually get the benefit of being linked to the hundreds of sites that use DMOZ data. Although the value of these links or pretty small, you still get a pretty substantial boost in PageRank.

You also might have heard of “link farms.”A link farm is basically a group of websites that link to all other sites in a certain group. They do this in many ways and often times they try to hide the links by making them the same color as the background. Of course, this is a form of spamming search engines and the indexing process so I would not recommend it. BUT if you do participate in this and have your link put on a link farm, you won’t have to fear getting caught by Google or other search engines. Your website cannot be penalized for some other website linking to yours because you simply don’t have control over what sites link to yours. Of course, link farms will do very little for you in terms of backlink value and SEO so don’t waste your time with them.

One more thing I would like to add is that there is a very quick and simple way of checking the backlinks to your site, or even your competitors site for that matter. All you need to do is go to Google, and type in link:http://YourDomain.com in the search box, and click search. But keep in mind that this simple search will not list EVERY backlink your site has. It will only list backlinks that contribute above a certain amount of PageRank. This is especially true if your blog is new. All pages indexed by Google have a PageRank, even if it’s extremely small. If you have 20 or 30 pages in your blog or website, they will likely all be linked to your homepage and may eventually give you a PageRank of 1. If you don’t have any backlinks or very little, a PageRank of 1 isn’t bad at all.

So hopefully I’ve answered a few questions and you use this information to continue building your successful blog/s.

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