Links pointing to your Web pages do several things for you:
- Links make it easier for search engines to find the page. As the search- bots travel around the Web, they follow links. They index a page, follow the links on that page to other pages, index those pages, follow the links on those pages, and so on. The more links to a page, the more likely the page is picked up and indexed by search engines, and the more quickly it happens.
- Search engines use the number of links pointing to a page as an indication of the page’s value. If lots of pages link to your page, search engines place a greater value on your page than pages with few links pointing to them. If you have lots of links from sites that are themselves linked to by many other sites, search engines conclude that your site must really be important. (Google calls this value the page’s PageRank, but Google isn’t the only search engine to use links as an indication of value; Yahoo!, for instance, before the Yahoo!/Bing partnership, was using something called Web Rank, and Bing has Page Score.
- Links provide information to search engines about the page they’re pointing to. The link text often contains keywords that search engines can use to glean additional information about your page. The theme of the site pointing to your site may also give search engines an indication of your site’s theme. For example, if you have links from hundreds of rodent-related Web sites, and those links have rodent-related keywords in them, it’s a good bet that your site has something to do with rodents.
- Links not only bring search bots to a page, but may also bring people to the page. The whole purpose of your search engine campaign is to bring people to your site, right? Sometimes people will actually click the links and arrive at your site; people often forget that in the SEO world! Links are very important. Sometimes they mean the difference between being indexed by a search engine and not being indexed, or between being ranked well in a search engine and barely being ranked at all.
Backlinks are an integral part of the optimization of your Web site. A backlink — this may surprise you — is a link back to your site. Search engines look at backlinks to figure out what your site is about and how important it is. Links aren’t something detached from your site; they’re an integral part of your site. Think of your Web site in terms of a regional map. Your site is the major city, and backlinks are the roads bringing traffic into the city. A geographer looking at the map wouldn’t regard the city and roads as separate entities; they’re all part of the same economic and social system. So don’t think of the links pointing to your site as something “out there” — they’re a critical part of your site.To know more about Link Building Process/Off-Page Optimizationor anything related to Digital Marketing, Join Digital Marketing Course in Delhi
Good Links and Bad Links:
Search engines must regard some types of links as more valuable than others. And it seems very likely to me that search engines will, over time, change how they regard links. They have, in fact, over time devalued certain types of links.
- Links inside paragraphs of text are likely regarded as more valuable than links in large lists or links set apart from text.
- Search engines could compare incoming links with outgoing links, and devalue a site’s links if it appears to do a lot of reciprocal linking from link pages.
- Links pointing to a page inside a site might be valued more highly than links to the home page.
- Outgoing links concentrated on a few pages might be valued less than links spread around a site.
When site owners figured out that links were valuable, they started playing tricks to boost incoming links to their sites. Some tricks were so egregious that search engines decided they were unacceptable. The trick you hear about most often is the link farm, an automated system that allows site owners to very quickly create thousands of incoming links by joining with thousands of other site owners to exchange links. Search engines don’t like link farms and will exclude link-farm pages if they identify them. Another trick is to create multiple shadow domains or satellite sites – groups of small, well- optimized Web sites that redirect traffic to a single site and link them all into one site.
However, as with much in the search engine optimization business, another myth has arisen. You may hear that if a link is found to your site from a link farm, you’ll be penalized.
