Backlinks: everything you wanted to know but were afraid to ask!

What are backlinks?

Before we talk about Back Links, let’s quickly discuss Forward Links (or Hyperlinks). These are the links on your website that either:

• link to other pages (or documents eg. images, videos, audio files, PDFs etc are all considered ‘documents’) within your website (internal links)
• or link to pages (or documents) on other websites (external links).

In the HTML markup language these links look like this:

<a href=”/contact_us.html”>Contact Us</a>
this points, or links, to a page within your own website

<a href=”http://www.google.com”>Google Website</a>
this points to someone else’s website – google.com in this example

Back Links (or more commonly written as Backlinks) are the opposite of Forward Links.

Backlinks (or Incoming Back Links (IBL) or inbound links or off-site links) are links from other websites to one of your web pages. In the 2nd example above, you are providing google.com with a backlink (a link from your site to theirs).

Why backlink?

Search Engines count the number of backlinks your website has pointing to it as part of it’s own process (ranking) to determine how popular or important your website is. The more backlinks you have pointing to your website, the more “important” the search engines think your website is.

In the “old days” this simple strategy was very effective in getting your website ranked well in the search engine results pages (SERPs). However, search engines (especially Google) have become a lot smarter and wiser, and now the “quality” and “relevance” of the site backlinking to your site plays a significant part in the ranking process.  For example, if the website backlinking to you has a high ranking itself, then this link from them to you is seen as a “vote of confidence” by some search engines (eg. Google), and will help improve your overall ranking.

How do I create backlinks?

Common methods used for obtaining links to your site include (but are not limited to):

• Sending a press release to online PR sites.
• Sending an article (with a link to your site) to article submission sites.
• Submiting your site to relevant online directories.
• Joining forums that are relevant to the content of your site, put a link to your site in the signature area, and submit on-topic comments to the site.

Another method of increasing back links is by paying for them on other sites. Many search engines, in particular Google, strongly frown on this method of gaining links.

How do I know what backlinks are “out there” pointing back at me?

You can conduct “special” searches in most search engines that will list all the sites it has indexed that have a link back to your site. Most of the engines also provide the ability to filter out (remove from the results) any links that come from your own website.

Google Example

Google provides the link: prefix to a search query. Using this prefix will (supposedly) list all the web pages it has indexed that have a link to your website (including your own web pages pointing to other web pages in your site). Now, I say “supposedly” because Google doesn’t list no where near the number of backlinks pointing to your site. There are several reasons mentioned by “those in the know”, including Google not wanting people to (partly) reverse engineer it’s ranking algorithm (which is apparently largely tied to the number and quality of backlinks pointing to your site). Regardless of the reason, the link: prefix will basically get you no where.

Here’s a screen shot of a backlink query for my own website http://serptracker.markread.com.au (click on any of the following images for a larger view).

google backlinks to serp tracker

Hmmm … only 2 backlinks (and one of them is from my own website)!!  But I know there are a lot more! Not only did I create them, but Google has increased my ranking based on them (and certainly not just based on the 2 shown in the link: report!!)

The problem with Google’s link: prefix (as of the date of this posting) is that it doesn’t show you all of the backlinks Google has indexed that are pointing to your site (don’t ask me why). We need to coerce it a little. A better query is @serptracker.markread.com.au This produces the following results:

Improved backlink Google query

Ok, 148 results. That’s better! But some of them are my web pages pointing back at my site. Let’s remove them so we only see other websites backlinking to me.

We do this by excluding our website from the query, like this:

@serptracker.markread.com.au -site:serptracker.markread.com.au

Now we get a set of results like so:

Final Google Backlink Query

Of course, Google isn’t the only search engine in town that can show you a backlink report (although Google does currently have the lions share of the market – refer to the article comparing organic clicks vs ppc clicks for more interesting statistics). You should ideally obtain a backlink report from the top 3 search engines as a minimum (Google, Yahoo, MSN) and combine them all together (into a spreadsheet for example).

View all Google Search Operators

Yahoo Example

Yahoo backlink report example for SERPtracker

Here is a list of typical backlink search queries for several popular search engines. The domain name I’m searching for in these examples is serptracker.markread.com.au:

Google
http://www.google.com/search?q=link:serptracker.markread.com.au&filter=0

Yahoo
http://search.yahoo.com/search?p=link:serptracker.markread.com.au&ei=UTF-8&fr=sfp&n=20&fl=0&x=wrt

Here’s a refinement. For more extensive results, try this search in the Yahoo search box:

linkdomain:serptracker.markread.com.au -site:serptracker.markread.com.au

The above search includes links to ALL pages on your site, not just the main page.

MSN
http://search.msn.com/results.asp?RS=CHECKED&FORM=MSNH&v=1&q=linkdomain:serptracker.markread.com.au

AllTheWeb
http://www.alltheweb.com/search?cat=web&cs=utf-8&q=link:serptracker.markread.com.au&_sb_lang=any

AltaVista
http://www.altavista.com/web/results?q=link%3Aserptracker.markread.com.au&kgs=0&kls=0&avkw=qtrp

There are also several free website services and tools that will produce a list of your backlinks from one or more search engines (some more accurately than others I might add). The commercial products generally offer the most comprehensive reports.

Here’s a few free sites I know of:

• http://www.iwebtool.com/backlink_checker
• http://www.backlinkfinder.com
• http://www.marketleap.com/publinkpop/default.htm

Getting quality backlinks will improve your website ranking in the search engines, but only if the backlinks remain in place. Articles, blogs, image banners and even whole domains do sometimes get deleted (by accident or otherwise). If you have a lot of these backlinks disappear you’ll notice your website will dip (sometimes dramatically) in the SERPs. So you’ll want to create quality backlinks to your site from time to time.

How can I measure my website ranking?

The manual method is by conducting a search of your website in the various search engines. The listing produced is called a SERP (Search Engine Results Page). Typically a search engine query will produce many SERPs that you can look through to find the position (rank) of your website.

Google SERPs for SERP Tracker (3 Aug 2009)

The screenshot above shows a typical Google search. You enter the keyword to search on, click on the Search button, then pages and pages of listings are returned. You’ll then need to look through these pages one by one, counting as you go, until you find your website referenced. This can be a very slow and laborious process, especially if your website is near the end of the SERPs (Google will return up to 1000 listings).

If you do this process regularly (for your own business or for your boss as part of your job role), you may want to take a look at an automated tool designed to record the ranking of your website over a period of time, like SERPtracker. This SERP tracking tool has been purposely built with one objective in mind; to historically track the ranking of your website in the Google SERPs.

Other resources

I hope this post has clarified some of the confusion surrounding the backlink topic. It is not meant as a definitive essay on the subject. Other resources you might want to look at include:

• Wikipedia