Increasing Your Website's Visibility

Are Backlinks Really That Important?

Most webmasters are concerned with increasing the visibility of their website on the Internet. Nowadays, a website that goes unnoticed by the search engines is a website that gets very little to no traffic and about the same amount of revenue.

If you are at all involved in the world of internet and search engine marketing, you know just how important Google is. The Google Company really is the King of the Internet world, and their search engine website ranking system, PageRank, is vital to any website's success.

There are multiple factors that Google takes into consideration when ranking websites.

The higher a website's PageRank is, the further toward the top of the list it will appear for search queries that are related to that site. Backlinks are one of the single most important factors that are taken into consideration when determining PageRank by Google. Backlinks are just what they sound like, links from one website back to the website in question.

Backlinks are important when determining PageRank because Google sees it as a vote in the favor of the website. This is why quality links are important; not just any link will do. For example, if a tourist authority has a backlink to a website about destination weddings in that area, Google will regard this backlink, or 'vote' in much more high regard than if some guy's blog links to that site. On the other hand, if a highly ranked blog about travel links to that same destination wedding site, this can be viewed as a quality backlink as well.

Some webmasters take things a bit too far and assume that any backlink is a good one. This is not the case, and Google will actually penalize a website for linking out to one of the sites that they have deemed "internet garbage." Known link farms are a good example of this. Links to or from link farms can actually hurt a website?s PageRank, and in return hurt a website's visibility on the most important search engine, Google.

When determining the value of backlinks, Google looks at a number of things. They look at the link, the quality of the website that is linking to the site, the text around the link, and the anchor text (the underlined words that contain the embedded link on the website).

You Can't Fool Google!

The worst thing that a webmaster can do is try to fool Google. This is why sites are penalized when they are linked to by known link farms, or when they link to link farms. This is not quality linking, and it creates a flaw in the system when it comes to users. There are ways to get quality backlinks, and having quality content that establishes your site as an authority in its niche is one of the single most effective ways. If other webmasters or bloggers find that your site is useful, they will link to it. This is why Google counts a link back to a website as a vote in its favor as far as relevance is concerned.

Keep in mind that if it looks like a link farm and smells like a link farm, Google is going to think it link farm.

PageRank indexing is not done by a human, but a computer program of sorts that crawls the web and looks at websites. It moves from page to page through the links going to and from it. This means that having a backlink from a relevant website will hold less weight if it also links to 200 or 300 other websites. The more links a website has leading out on a page, the less the links are bound to mean to the Google bot. Although this blog is not a link farm, just a blog with a generous owner, Google has no way of knowing the difference.

It is also important to have different backlinks pointing toward your page with different anchor text, and for the very same reason. If all pages are pointing toward your destination wedding site with the anchor text? destination wedding,? the backlink will lose importance in the eyes of Google.

The moral of the story is this: backlinks are important.

They are, or should be, the backbone of any serious search engine marketing campaign. Google really values backlinks, and how many you have is only as important as the quality of the backlinks. If anything, quality out values quality, but with a diverse array of backlinks that are from quality sites, your site can be a winner.

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Article ID:
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Date added:
07-08-2011 08:34:56
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