What are Backlinks? The short description is that they are links to your website from other websites that help your ranking on search engines. When you have a site with no backlinks it is referred to as an "orphan page" which means the site is difficult to find because the only way people can get to it is by typing the URL in the address bar.
The average person travels through the internet through one entrance, be it Facebook, Youtube, a news page, or a blog they like. Once they have visited the page something on it will catch their attention and they will click the link and move on to the next site. This is why backlinks are valuable. They allow your difficult to find site to be easily reached through backlinks on other websites.
Google understands backlinks like this: If Website A has a link to Website B on their page, it is basically saying Website A is endorsing Website B and giving them an "up vote" and adds a point to their score which will help push you to the top of search ranking.
Sounds easy to manipulate, right? It seems like you can just find a way to pay for other websites to put your link on your page and your rank will skyrocket. A common practice is to submit your website url to sites dedicated that having nothing but backlinks. They post your webiste url to their directory for free but it takes 2-3 months or you can pay between $5 to $40 to have it reviewed within 48 hours. Some directories like the Yahoo directory listing page can cost you around $299.
The all knowing, all powerful Google is much smarter than you. They have deindexing hundreds of free directories in the past because they are a low-quality. Does having your links in low-quality directories hurt you? Probably not. Google basically is now blind to these low-quality directories and if they can't see them they can't see your link so it won't hurt you.
Quality backlink directories however are still indexed and can be good for your ranking. Some people really swear by it and say that that it's a powerful way to backlinks while others think it's an out-dated form of SEO. It's really hard to tell with Googles frequent updates.
No really, how effective are backlinks? At ACU Web we employ dozens of strategies for SEO and one of the tactics we used for years was to purchase and submit URLs to directory sites to create backlinks for our clients.
What we have found lately is that the directory listings are not performing very well, or even at all so we've focused more of our energies to content creation.
Sly Strategy - Backlinks are great but only if they're from quality sites which means you have to find a way to make your website interesting without overtly trying to market so that other people will share your content on social media sites and their personal blogs. That's the only foolproof way to get quality backlinks.
If you want to learn more about some Tips & Tricks on how to get quality backlinks read my blog post here.
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