Exploring Backlinks and Google
Part and parcel of the Search Engine Optimization world are these little things known as backlinks that seem to generate so much buzz and get so many people all worked up about them. Essentially though, backlinks are simply links that point to your website from some other, third party, website - so what's the big deal about them?
Frankly, the big deal is that Google places a lot of importance on backlinks. In fact, they now form a core part of the algorithm that it uses to determine what listings appear as search engine results. Because of this, it's only natural that everyone who stands to gain from a higher search engine ranking would want to get more and more backlinks.
But why and how does Google use these backlinks?
If you spend a minute thinking about it a little, you'll find that it really does make sense. Essentially, Google feels that if one website is linking to another, then it must have a good reason for doing so, i.e. the first website is acknowledging the fact that the second website's content is good enough to link to.
Really, that sort of makes it sound like the backlink is a 'vote' in its favor, which is exactly what Google takes it as. The only difference is that by Google's laws there is no such thing as an 'equal' vote, and instead all backlinks are weighted according to yet another ranking system known as Page Rank (PR, for short).
Every website that Google puts into its database is listed according to Page Rank. Therefore, when one website links to another, Google takes into account its PR and weighs that backlinks accordingly. So a backlink from a PR5 website is way better than a backlink from a PR1 website.
In fact, backlinks from high authority websites (i.e. governmental bodies) are extremely valuable indeed as such sites would not like out to you without good reason!
Knowing this, it should be obvious to you that any effort to just go out there and grab as many backlinks as possible would probably be a waste of time. Instead, what you need to do is find some way to gain as many high authority backlinks seeing as they'll count a lot more than some easily acquired PR 1 or PR 2 backlink.
For the time being, backlinks certainly appear as if they're here to stay. Who knows what Google has planned for the future though. In the meantime, you might as well take advantage of the opportunity that is right in front of your eyes.
Keep getting backlinks, and you'll see your website start to climb those search engine results with ease!
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