I have mentioned before that one of the important factors used by Google algorithms is the quality of the content. Another equally important factor is how popular a webpage is on the web.
Popularity, in this case, refers to how many references/mentions/backlinks a webpage has from other related pages on the web.
Let’s take it from the beginning.
Back in the 1990s when Google was in its early stages, Larry Page and Sergey Brin created a system to calculate how valuable a page is.
They thought that a page that has more references (links) from other pages on the web is more important and useful to other users than pages that have fewer references or no references at all.
They called this system PageRank.
As you can see in the diagram above, backlinks make a website stronger and more popular and this means higher rankings in the Google search results.
What is a backlink?
A backlink is a link that points from one domain to the other. For the website that links out, it is called an “outbound link” and for the website that receives the link, it is called an “inbound link”.
Importance of backlinks in SEO
Over the years Google tried to find a way to rank websites that were less reliant on backlinks.
Despite their efforts and a number of tests performed, they concluded that web pages with a greater number of inbound links are indeed more useful to users than pages with fewer links. So, backlinks are still very important for SEO.
Link Building
From the above statement, it is clear that in order to achieve high rankings in Google, you need backlinks. The obvious question is how to get them. Are all links equal?
This is how the term link building was born. As Google grew in popularity, webmasters realized the importance of backlinks and they started building links from other websites to satisfy the algorithm needs, get higher rankings, and more traffic to their websites.
It was not long before the situation went out of hand. The web was flooded with websites whose sole purpose was to provide links to other websites without adding real value to the web or to users.
These were known as link farms and later as article directories.
The end result was that low-quality websites started appearing at the top of Google search results not because they provided great value to the users but because they had a lot of backlinks.
Google’s priority was (and still is), to provide a great experience for users so they took a number of actions to protect their search results.
Google Penalties
This is how Google penalties were born. Google added more rules to its ranking algorithm to differentiate good links from bad links.
Websites with a lot of bad backlinks get a penalty, and as a result, their rankings are reduced or they disappear completely from the Google index.
What is a good link?
A link added by a webmaster without monetary compensation A link coming from a related website
A link coming from a website that is trusted by Google
A link that adds additional value to the users of that website.
Any links that don’t fall in one of the above categories are considered bad links and should be avoided if you want to stay out of trouble.
How can you get backlinks to your website and improve your rankings?
In a nutshell, the best way to get links from other websites is to create superb content that other webmasters will find useful and will reference from their websites.
This is also called natural link building and it’s the safest way to improve your Google rankings.
The problem is that although you may have great content on your website, not a lot of people can find it (since it has low rankings) and this means fewer chances of getting links.
In the Off-Page SEO lesson, we’ll see how to safely get more backlinks and improve your rankings.
Tag：SEO
