The Internet is crowded with millions of websites, and you very well know that each such website contains multiple web pages. Many websites carry quality information, which may be useful and informative. Many websites very often place a link to a qualitative, informative, and content-rich website on their pages. This link that a website or a web page receives from another website is called a backlink.
For example: Let’s say you are running a fitness center, and you have a website where you upload information and articles on fitness for the benefit of your customers. Now, it may be possible that there is additional great information on, say, BBC’s fitness section, which you want your customers to be aware of. So, you will place a link on your website that urges readers to visit the BBC fitness section for more information. This link you have placed on your website is a backlink for the BBC website (Fitness Section).
In Internet terminology, backlinks are also referred to as incoming links, inbound links or inward links.
Something More About Web Site Backlinks
The more the backlinks a website or a web page receives, the more popular is the website/web page considered. The reasoning is obvious: If a website has great quality content or is giving away for free a useful software tool, then such a website will receive numerous backlinks from other websites.
On the flipside, it may be possible that a website does not have good content and yet it is getting a whole lot of backlinks. In such a case, the backlinks are spammed backlinks: Some unscrupulous websites/web marketers create a web-ring of sites without any noteworthy content, or no content at all, and place cross-backlinks on their own websites, trying to create a decent PageRank, and then they tom-tom about their link-building abilities.
However, search engine algorithms are getting smarter by the day and they can ferret out content-less or useless-content pages, and maybe can even blacklist them.
Why are Web Backlinks Important?
Once upon a time, there was no tool available to measure a website’s popularity based on the backlinks received by them. Google’s PageRank changed all that.
Google’s PageRank system started assigning a rank to websites based on the backlinks they received, and suddenly backlinks were big business. The higher the number of backlinks a website receives, the higher its PageRank would be. And if a website has a high PageRank, it stands a higher chance of climbing up on a search engine’s results page.
Nowadays, all the search engines’ algorithms have built-in link popularity as one of the factors for determining how high up a website can appear on a search engine’s page result.
Naturally, link building has turned into a business and there are many specialized link-building and link-trading companies engaged in linking websites as a fulltime business activity.
To Sum Up Website Backlinks
To sum up, if you have a website or are maintaining a website, it will do you good if you receive a whole lot of backlinks. However, remember to factor in the following features while receiving backlinks:
· Receiving a backlink from a content-less or useless site will work against you.
· Receiving a backlink from a high PageRanked site will be what the site promotion doctor ordered.
· One-way links are more important than a reciprocal or mutual exchange of links.
