What Is A BackLink

A BackLink is a link located on a website that leads to your website, also known as incoming links, inbound links, or inlinks. A link pointing BACK to your site.

These are important to a website in two different ways. One, for direct targeted traffic from other websites, and two, for the link popularity. In the earlier days of the internet, inbound links from other websites were an essential source of traffic. Prior to the gigantic databases and the fast, frequent crawling of today’s search engines, directories and links from popular sites were what could make or break a website. Inbound links still have the power to elevate websites, but direct traffic from them is only half of the benefit. Now, a backlink from a very popular website has the power to dramatically increase the link popularity of the site on the receiving end.

All search engines have a portion of their algorithm (which determines what websites come up in the top of search results) devoted to link popularity. Every backlink a website has that is crawled and indexed by a search engine is counted as a “vote” for the site’s value and usefulness, which increases its link popularity. The more higher quality backlinks a site has, the higher its link popularity is, and high link popularity leads to better search engine rankings and better search engine visibility overall.

An incoming link from a site that’s considered an authority in the same realm would be the most valuable backlink. For example, if you ran a small business that sold replacement parts for sewing machines, and one of the major international sewing machine manufacturers linked back to your website, that would significantly boost your overall relevance on the subject in the eyes of the search engines. Inlinks don’t have to be from major players to be helpful. Any link from a site with content that’s closely related matters, though quality is much more important than quantity.

Inbound links from known Link Farms or Link Exchange programs will be filtered out by most search engines. When this happens there will be no positive effects from these links – no matter how many there are. In fact, too many of them could actually result in penalties against a website. Most search engines will discount pages with large volumes of unrelated link content.

Most search engines will let you check the number of incoming links to a website. If you enter link:yourwebsitehere.com in to the search field at Google, it will respond with some results of sites linking to that website – but not all of them. Creating a Webmasters account at Google will give you more complete and detailed information about a site’s incoming links. Using Yahoo’s “Site Explorer” will detail a website’s inbound links that have been crawled in their database. There are also several online tools that will check a site’s backlinks. Whether a backlink is deemed to be of value or not will be up to the individual search engines, so there will be differences in link numbers and content from engine to engine.