Understand Backlinks from Search Engines

Most Search Engine Optimizers understand the importance of the backlinks in order for a website to succeed. Most search engines take into account of the backlinks quality for their ranking algorithm. We will cover the top three search engines (Google, Yahoo and MSN) here and discuss how they treat backlinks from their point of view.

The most popular search engine, Google, places great emphasis on backlinks. In fact, relevant backlinks is all a website needs to achieve a high ranking in Google result page. Google, however, does not shows all the indexed backlinks when user queries with the link: operator. In addition, Google does not update their backlink index as frequent as their search results.

It is believed that multiple backlinks from a same domain does not have the stack effect in Google. For example, links from forum signatures and directories will have minimum weigh in Google's ranking algorithm.

Yahoo, on the other hand, chooses to display all the backlinks to the users. A search with the link: operator often reveals most of a page's backlinks to screen. Although they display most of the backlinks, it does not mean that they value them as much as in Google. Unfortunately, backlinks are not as important as they are in Yahoo than in Google.

Yahoo has introduced a site explorer interface to aid the webmasters in locating the backlinks and other useful information. Yahoo also provides one of the best API for the web masters' usage.

MSN also offers to display all the backlinks to the user with the link: operator query. The backlinks update in MSN also seems to be the most updated among all the three search engines. It may seems that MSN focus a lot on backlinks but this is usually not the case. Backlinks are not as important as keyword domain in MSN's point of view.

In conclusion, Google is the only search engine that put a lot of focus on backlinks in their ranking formula and since they are the most popular search engine, backlinks are important for every website. It is recommended to use Yahoo or MSN to check for backlinks because they show a more complete listing.

By Tan KC | Posted on 2007-07-14 23:32:25

About The Author:

KC is a SEO consultant with several years of related experiences. His advice has helped several Webmasters to increase their SERP. KC is the founder of USESEO.COM, a site that offers free SEO techniques. At the same time, he runs the only link investment site on the net, LinkVestor.

Definition:

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 not called as incoming links, inbound links, inlinks, and inward links. 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. To see a site's PageRank, you need to use the Google Toolbar for Microsoft's Internet Explorer or Mozilla Firefox, view the bar graph indicating a website's PageRank in Google's directory, or download the PageRank plugin for Mozilla Firefox.

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