Please explain backlinks - how you get them and whats the benefit!

please?

 

Im also interested to know!

 

Backlinks are what drive Google's and other engines rankings for the most part. Think of Content as King, and Backlinks are the queen!

When you get a back link from other reputable sites, that are related to your niche, it counts as a large vote of confidence for your site as being reputable, worthy of rankings. Now the more back links you get from related sites, the better your rankings will be.

You can get back links from unrelated sites as well, these help some, but not as much as ones from other related sites.

When you get a back link, the text used to link to you is called the anchor text. This anchor text serves a purpose for 2 reasons. It lets users know what the link maybe about, but more importantly it lets engines know what the page should be about. When you link to a page and use click here it doesn't say much about the page. But if you link using text like Please explain what backlinks are?. This tells the engines the page should be about explaining backlinks.

There are tons of ways to get them, signature links, buying them (not advised) articles, directories, blog comments, blog posts, asking your friends to back link to you. Its really endless on how to get them and its only limited by your creativity.

The best way is whats called "link baiting" write a unique article thats good and capitivates people. Using something recent, and trivial such as "Is Jon Goselin a Douchebag" and hope people like it, and then they'll spread it like wildfire.

I did that one time and got an article on the front page of Yahoo sports. Back in early 2009 before they announced the Madden cover, I wrote an article and made it sound as if eli manning was going to be on the cover for winning the super bowl. This lead to thousands of relevant back links, shooting the domain to the top of the SERPs and giving it a PR4 in under 3 months.

 

Thanks for that David thats generally the idea i had and you have cleared it up for me

 

The premise of backlinks is quite simple actually. You get other sites to link to your site. Either directly to the index page or to content pages within the site.

In practice it gets a little more complicated. Backlinks have always been useful for your site but Google really popularized them with the page rank algorithms they use. Basically in Google's eyes, the more links that point to a site, the more important a site is. The more important a site is, the higher up it shows in the rankings for the keywords it uses. What Google is not stating outright is that they are looking for natural links. These are links to your content placed on websites owned by other people because your content is worth sharing. Most links are purchased as advertising, made through link exchanges and other less valuable means like forum signatures. Google can differentiate between natural links and all the others so different links get different weights.

Since Google started doing this in 1999, others have integrated linking into their algorithms as well. Maybe not to the extent of Google but they are taken into consideration. These others include Microsoft, Yahoo, and Ask. Primarily these three are Google's competitors. Though Yahoo is actually getting out the search business and will be handing that portion of their site over to Microsoft for management.

For your site, you want to encourage people to link back to your content. If you use advertising to promote your site than you need to make sure that the entry points are consistent in that advertising. The more people that link back to you, the more important you are.

With forums, this becomes difficult. Most people do not link to forum threads unless they answer a direct question elsewhere. If they do this in another forum, often times they are accused of spamming even though the World Wide Web is designed to be a massive database of interconnected links and websites. If they do it on their twitter or facebook pages, the relevance is reduced. To get around this what you need to do is make sure your site provides quality content that people want to link to. The more links the better chances you have to overcome the lower relevancy of people sharing the links.

If you're an expert in your niche, submit articles to other sites. This allows you to create backlinks to your own site and improve your importance. Article content is truly the top way to increase your ranking in the search engines at this time.

 

I understand the above completely.

I do not understand this part. For example if I wrote an article for vbcodex or AA (I may have in fact) then how does that create a backlink?

 

Other people will link to it, but what I think Wayne is talking about is submitting your article to other article directory sites.

There are literally tons of them. Google Article submissions, or article submission sites, press releases, etc.

 

I did google 'article submissions' and indeed there were many results, so many in fact my confusion has not subsided regarding this matter.

I did click on this one:
Article Submission Directory | Submit Your Articles For Huge Exposure

and clicked on a few links. There were articles, and within those articles were a few hot links. Is the idea to submit articles to a place like that then have people surf those sites and find them? Or are there feeds from that site somewhere?


What we have been doing is creating unique content that others are quite interested in. People on several other forums, have been posting links to our forums threads, when that helps people seeking information.

 

On sites geared for Articles, you usually get an "Author Box" where a little description about you and a link to your site are present. vBulletin forums don't really do that at this time.

Some article directories allow people to use the content on their own sites so your article would spread around the net, and while it is duplicate content that doesn't penalize you. Other sites like Suite101.com show your article to their own traffic and you get backlinks to your site.

However I was speaking more of finding sites on the same topics as yours and submitting guest articles to their site. They would display the content and link back to you. So if you're a expert Web Developer you would submit some articles to Sitepoint.com and then can feed off their "Importance" to your site.

 

Ok, so for that to be effective when writing an article for vbcodex or AA there should be a link to the authors site. Possibly in the 'about the author' section, or a link to 'more information' on the authors forum.


The term 'back' in 'back links' refers to smaller sites getting exposure via the more popular sites? Like a father giving a ride to a child on his back?


Up until now I thought it had some obscure technical meaning, possibly hidden links.

 

thanks for your help!

are links in other sites footer a good way to start?

 

could you do a few step guide into the best and first steps i should take to up them now please!

 

Backlink = a link back. If you were to write an article and we published it here on AA with your link in the "About the Author" section, that link is essentially a backlink to your site.

Backlinks from reputable sites result in your site (the site the backlinks point to) becoming more important to the search engines.

 

Thanks Nick. Seems there are 2 ways of looking at it.
Back link = link back, and to me 'link back' would be a better name, and
Back link = hitching a ride on the back of a larger creature/site, usually with restrictions, and permission, of the larger site. At least that is how it appears on sitepoint from the 5 minutes I spent on it.

And all this time I thought it was invisible or hidden links because they were in the background LOL....

 

Very much frowned upon. :yes:

Search engine spiders these days understand CSS so they know when your hiding something to people and not hiding it to them. This falls under cloaking and can actually get you banned from the search index.

 

Good information Wayne! I've not played any games and intend not to.

 

This has been an interesting topic to read so far, and like many other people I'm slowly getting a sort of decent understanding of how all this backlink/SEO thing actually works. However, a few questions I thought include:

1. How are many people here supposed to get links from blog comments? Three quarters of them are nofollow. Not conductive to SEO or page rank.

2. And the article submissions people here mention and many people don't understand... apart from these article directories, how are you supposed to just submit articles to other websites? I don't know a whole load of websites that even accept articles from other people, at least not in the subject areas I'm interested in, relying more on hired journalists or the website owner's writing skills.

 

There are plenty of blogs where there is no rel="nofollow" on the comments, you just need to find them

EzineArticles Submission - Submit Your Best Quality Original Articles For Massive Exposure, Ezine Publishers Get 25 Free Article Reprints allows you to submit to their categories, maybe check them out

 

They are out there. Would take some looking and correspondance. You could create article exchanges on sites like Admin Addict as well.

Actually you would be looking for "Do Follow" blogs. There are enough of them. However if you create good content on your topic and get out out there with Digg, Technorati, StumbleUpon, Twitter, etc... then others will pick it up and eventually link back to you.

 

Oops got the two confused there haha