Many people think that quality back links are the single biggest factor getting good organic rankings with the search engines. Although they are not as important for Yahoo and MSN, they seem to be critical to Google (70% of the SEO market) and getting out of the Google sandbox. At Pubcom, the experts said that the search engines consider a back link like a vote for a site. The more votes you get, the better the site is and the more referral you should get from the search engines.
Back links have been a basis for ranking for many years and so back linking has become an industry. Back link farms (who sell bulk back links) and Web rings were created to try and cheat the system. Now the search engines are smarter and they rate back links in addition to logging them. This makes links from farms and rings essentially worthless. Many older sites have purchased links. I don’t think these links negatively affect rankings but they just don’t help and are a waste of time and money.
The best back link is a one-way link from a high PR website. A few link exchanges (reciprocal links) are OK but they won’t give you a huge boost.
Back links for dot-gov and dot-org sites may have more value than a link from a dot-com because of their high trust factor.
Logically, this makes sense to me. A non-reciprocal back link for a well trusted site is an indicator of a quality site. When well-established sites (with limited out links) link to a site, it is usually because the site is an important one that people should know about. The more out links on the site or page, the less value for each link.
Some experts say that you must have a link signature (Ex: 60% .com in your market with 4 .edu links and 10 reciprocal links, and 25 blog links) that is similar to your competitors. I don’t see the logic here. This would essentially ban any revolutionary sites and force everyone to follow the leader. I hope this is not true.
Type into the Google or Yahoo search bar
Link:http://www.sitename.com
To find out how many back links you or your competitors have.
My biggest competitor has 7,993 inlinks on Yahoo (wow) and 425 on Google. Google only shows a sampling of the back links for some reason
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