Backlinks are incoming links to a website or web page. The number of backlinks is an indication of the popularity or importance of that website or page. In basic link terminology, a backlink is any link received by a web node (web page, directory, website, or top level domain) from another web node (Björneborn and Ingwersen, 2004). Backlinks are also known as incoming links, inbound links, inlinks, and inward links.
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Search engine rankings
Search engines often use the number of backlinks that a website has as one of the factors for determining that website's search engine ranking. For example, Google's PageRank algorithm uses backlinks to help determine a site's rank (the Google Toolbar can be used to view the PageRank of a web page). Therefore, websites often employ various techniques (called search engine optimization) to increase the number of backlinks pointing to their website. Due to the abuse of using paid links to improve search engine marketing, Google partially updated their Page Rank Tool to pin against paid links providers and the forward link of sites. This action resulted in a significant decrease in Page Rank of many websites worldwide. However although many believe that Google penalizes people for having unrelated backlinks to their sites, this has never been confirmed.
Obtaining backlinks from search engines
Most commercial search engines provide a mechanism to determine the number of backlinks they have recorded to a particular web page. For example, Google can be searched using (or ) to find the number of pages on the Web pointing to http://wikipedia.org/. Google frequently only shows a subset of all existing backlinks to a web page [1], possibly because of the network costs of providing this information and to avoid exposing the inner-workings of their ranking algorithms. Yahoo!’s Site Explorer and Microsoft's Live Search may give more accurate backlink counts. Google has recently added a new webmaster tool which allows webmasters to view more backlinks to their websites [2].
Technical
When HTML was designed, there was no explicit mechanism in the design to keep track of backlinks in software, as this carried additional logistical and network overhead. While Google does keep track of some HTML backlinks, the data can be delayed by hours or months, and backlink data is not kept for pages that Google doesn't watch, such as password-protected areas or dynamic web pages. Some website software internally keeps track of backlinks. Examples of this include most wiki and CMS software. Other mechanisms have been developed to track backlinks between disparate webpages controlled by organizations that aren't associated with each other. The most notable example of this is TrackBacks between blogs.
See also
References
- Lennart Björneborn and Peter Ingwersen (2004). "Toward a Basic Framework for Webometrics". Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology 55 (14): 1216-1227.
External links
- Backlink Checker by BacklinkWatch
- How to check backlinks to your blog/website?
- Why Backlinks Are So Important
- Backlinks: The Backbone of Search Engine Success by Article Marketer
- SEO Tool: Free seo tool that provides link popularity for Google, Yahoo and MSN also Google Page Rank and Alexa Rank provided by Rank Look Up
