Links, links and more links
August 13th, 2008 by Dan Roberts A few days ago I introduced the idea of the Latent Semantic Indexing algorithm as a way for search engines to evaluate the value of a page for its keywords based on the keywords of its sub-pages. Some readers, however, misconstrued my article as completely deprecating the value of backlinks. This was not the case, in fact the introduction, I stated that links were important, but that Semantic Indexing was becoming increasingly important. SO why are links important, and what are they becoming less important?
First and foremost, search engines and Google in particular view links to your website as a tick for your website as the relevancy and authority of the content of your site. The more links the more important your site must be and therefore the higher it ranks in search engines. Combine many links with strong on-site optimisation (the part of optimisation for your site that makes it clear and easy for search to determine what your keywords are) and you are sure to succeed in search engines theoretically.
A second benefit of inbound links is that search engine robots will be driven to your website more often.
So why would I say that search engines are placing less decreasing value on inbound links and increasing value on alternative weightings such as Semantic Indexing algorithms.
Quite simply I believe it is due to the continual gaming of the system by us. Once we realised the importance of links we started creating massive links pages and even sites that were totally dedicated to links (called link farms). These clearly aren’t the useful resource that Google envisaged. Links from pages with many other links were heavily discounted and link farms removed from the index - giving them no value at all. In our obsession to get links we started swapping them - I will link to your website, if you will link to mine (reciprocal linking). This is not really the idea either - a link is a tick for the quality of the content being linked to - most people simply swap links to home pages - which are often not the most relevant resource. The result was that Google started deprecating reciprocal links. The story is never-ending. We created small one page sites (called splash pages) with a bit of content and a link to our site. Google now searches the database for shared IP addresses or URLs owned by the same person. Sites with high Page Rank started selling links - Google now bans sites that pay for or sell links, and so it goes on..
But links are still very important! However, what counts is quality not quantity. You can literally have 10 inbound links that have the same ranking power as 1,000 poor quality links that are derived from link swapping, link buying etc.
The surest way to get backlinks is to build a quality website and work to gain top listings in respected directories such as Yahoo! and DMOZ.