Having more external inbound links is something to be desired. If these links can be quality links with a lot of link juice, that’s even better. For best results, try to acquire inbound links from sites or pages with high PageRank values. As a rule of thumb, backlinks with a minimum PageRank value of 4 yield the best results.

As long as those links are not from link farms or other link schemes, you should be in good shape. The more backlinks you acquire from high-PageRank sites, the better. Backlinks say a lot about a website’s popularity. You can think of backlinks as votes for your link or URL. This is what search engines consider in their rankings as well.

The benefit is multifold, as you will be receiving traffic from your backlinks as well as from the search engines.

Speed of Backlink Accumulation:

How fast are you accumulating backlinks? This can become a negative ranking factor if your site is found to be using an unethical linking scheme.

If all your backlinks are using the same anchor text, search engines may view this as suspicious activity, which might trigger a manual inspection by the search engines and a delisting of your site. Let’s say your site had 20 backlinks yesterday, and today you suddenly have more than 100,000. Wouldn’t that look suspicious?

Topical Link Relevance:

It is important for backlinks to contain relevant anchor text. Here are some examples of good and bad anchor text:

<!–Good–>

<a target=_new href=”http://yoursite.com/basketball>Learn about

Basketball</a>

<a target=_new href=”http://yoursite.com/basketball>Talk about

Basketball at www.yoursite.com</a>

<!–Bad–>

<a target=_new href=”http://yoursite.com/basketball”>Click Here</a>

<a target=_new href=”http://yoursite.com/basketball”>

http://yoursite.com</a>

<a target=_new href=”http://yoursite.com/basketball”>more..</a>

<a href=”http://yoursite.com/basketball”><img

src=”http://www.somesite.net/pic1.jpg”></a>

The good examples use relevant text in the links. The bad examples, although they use the same destination URL, do not use relevant text. Ideally, the referring sites should also be talking about the same subject matter. At the very least, the referring page should be on the same topic.

Backlinks from Expert Sites & the Hilltop Algorithm:

For good or bad, search engines have given certain websites a biased advantage over all other sites for most of the popular keywords. The basis of this practice stems from a popular ranking algorithm developed at the University of Toronto, called the Hilltop Algorithm.

The creators of the Hilltop Algorithm define it as follows:

“…a novel ranking scheme for broad queries that places the most authoritative pages on the query topic at the top of the ranking. Our algorithm operates on a special index of “expert documents.” These are a subset of the pages on the WWW identified as directories of links to non-affiliated sources on specific topics. Results are ranked based on the match between the query and relevant descriptive text for hyperlinks on expert pages pointing to a given result page.”

At the time of this writing, in a search for the keyword hilltop algorithm, Google’s search results look like the below figure.

Biased SERP

In this example, the Wikipedia search result came in ahead on Google, as it did on Yahoo! and Bing. Now, if we open the Wikipedia result, we don’t really see much except for the definition. So a single-paragraph page with a ton of useless Wikipedia links gets a PageRank value of 5 and the first spot on Google. Meanwhile, all other search results on the first page contain much more information on the given keywords.

Google at least showed one page from the University of Toronto in its top 10 results - unlike Yahoo! and Bing. This is because the Wikipedia page contains the exact same link from the University of Toronto!

This should speak volumes about the importance of backlinks from expert sites. The pattern of Wikipedia importance is repeated countless times, so get a link on Wikipedia if you can!

Tags: Backlinks, External Links, Quality, Quantity, Search Engine Optimization, SEO, SEO Tips

This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 28th, 2010 at 12:09 am and is filed under Daily SEO Tips, SEO. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.