What are links?
Links are those blue bits of text, which, when clicked direct users from one website to another. They are linking entities of the internet between each other and making navigating between websites easier, faster and smoother.
What are backlinks?
Backlinks are links that enable websites to get from one to another(s). In essence, backlinks are the same links but from the perspective of the website.
During the early days of internet search engines backlinks didn’t have as much importance as they have now. Back then, search engines would mainly use on-site signals to rank websites in their search engine result pages. But with time people started abusing this and spammed their pages with keywords and were tweaking all the bits of their websites to trick search engine algorithms to rank them higher than the competitors. Matters got worse with the appearance of search engine specialists who later became the SEO Experts of today. It was ok to spam meta tags, especially meta keywords, to get desired rankings in search engines.
Google Algorithm
And then came Google… The idea behind Google’s search algorithm was to take the emphasis from on-page factors affecting it to off-page factors where the SEOs and webmasters didn’t have much power of tweaking 3rd party websites and tricking Google’s algorithm. This was the main factor behind the success of Google and overtaking the search engine market in such a short period. They’ve levelled the playing field, implementing a backlink “voting” system, and by doing so provided the most relevant and highest quality search results.
How do backlinks work?
Imagine presidential elections and the website is a candidate, with your competitors being other candidates. The candidate with the most and best votes wins the first position if we discount all other ranking factors. The only difference is that not all votes are equal and a voter can vote for multiple candidates or give more than one vote to the same candidate. The more votes (backlinks) you have and the stronger votes (backlinks) you have – the better.
Backlinks are a major ranking factor and, in fact, multiple pieces of research show that top rankings have the highest correlation with the number of domains linking to the website:
Source: https://moz.com/search-ranking-factors
To explain the graph above – websites and pages that tend to do well in terms of Google search engine results pages’ rankings have higher numbers of domains linking back to them 8.22 out of 10 when 1 is not influential and 10 is highly influential.
In the end, it is important to highlight again that not all links are equal and naturally created links are the best. Don’t forget about the relevance and quality of the backlinks for your website.
Keep following our blog for more information on how to start your backlink building campaign or what are the best sources of backlinks to improve your website’s backlink profile and not get blacklisted by Google for spam backlinks.
Get in touch with us if you have questions about this or other topics we discuss in our blog or if you would like to enquire about our digital marketing services.
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