• Register
• Log in

SEO Theory - SEO Theory and Analysis Blog

Algorithm analysis, Web community relationship analysis, SEO practices and techniques, industry news, etc.

• Home
• About SEO Theory
• SEO Glossary

Backlinks: The Beginner’s Guide to Backlink Theory

Posted by Michael Martinez on July 9, 2007 in Link Theory

Nearly every SEO today is obsessed with building backlinks. Most of those people really have no idea of why they are building backlinks. They have gone to SEO conferences, read SEO blogs, and browsed SEO forums. They have had backlinks pounded into their psyches along with pseudo-theories, faux explanations of the Google algorithm, and plenty of nonsense.

Web marketing is more dependent upon backlinks than search engine optimization. In fact, search engine optimization hardly needs backlinks at all. Most SEOs would be incapable of explaining how backlinks are important for SEO. The idea that you need backlinks to improve your search results rankings is absolute, complete, utter nonsense.

You can improve your search results rankings with backlinks. You don’t have to use them. Need dictates that you cannot do without something. You don’t need hundreds or thousands of backlinks in search engine optimization. What you do need is to understand how backlinks are important and how they can help you, which are two different matters altogether.

Why you need backlinks in search engine optimization

There are only two reasons for why you need backlinks in search engine optimization (there are more than two reasons for Web site marketing):

1. You need links to be crawled
2. You need (the right) links to be included in search indexes

There are no other reasons for why you need backlinks in search engine optimization.

Building backlinks occupies a lot of people’s time in search engine optimization. It’s the least effective, least efficient model for SEO and yet most people focus on backlinks. Social media optimizers can rationalize their obsession with backlinks. Search engine optimizers cannot.

Backlink profiles are commonly discussed in SEO forums as if they mean something. In most cases the backlink profiles that people build are completely useless. As I recently explained in one SEO forum, “numbers of backlinks has nothing to do with search engine optimization”. You don’t optimize a Web site through backlinks.

How backlinks can help search engine optimization

If you don’t optimize a Web site through backlinks, what do you do with them? The real answer is that it depends on the search engine. At the very least backlinks will help you validate a Web site. When I speak of “validating a Web site” I mean you show the search engine that the site is worth indexing and showing people.

Validation = trust. Trust is not quantifiable and does not equal any particular number of backlinks. If you’re looking for Google’s TrustRank Algorithm you’ve been led down the garden path. There is no Google TrustRank algorithm. All the major search engines (Ask, Google, Live, and Yahoo!) validate Web pages in their own ways. For the record, Yahoo! invented TrustRank but it’s highly doubtful they actually use it.

Search engines also allow backlinks to pass anchor text and a quantifiable value that we’ll call PageRank. I’m not talking about Toolbar PR with its silly, irrelevant, meaningless 0 to 10 values. I mean the real stuff, the internal PageRank you cannot see on any toolbars or SEO tools.

PageRank may be used to weight a page so that it may be given a higher position in search engine results for various queries. Anchor text will certainly help a page that receives it.

Google has divided the Web into four parts: the Main Web Index, the Supplemental Web Index, the Other Google Indexes, and that portion of the Web Google chooses not to index.

Except for the dual Web indexing, the other search engines have three similar divisions: the Main Web, the Other Stuff, and the stuff they leave out.

Having the right backlinks will get you into search engines’ Main Web Indexes. Those backlinks are trusted. Their anchor text doesn’t matter.

Search engine optimization is not about volumes of backlinks. If you just want to get a high ranking for a particular keyword, you can do it in one of three ways without incurring the search engines’ wrath:

1. Use a lot of content on one page
2. Use a lot of content on a page combined with inbound link anchor text
3. Use a lot of inbound link anchor text

There is nothing else to it.

The real finesse, the art that a competent SEO demonstrates in his or her work is defined by the balance they strike between content and inbound link anchor text. But do you understand why you need to balance your content between what you put on the page and what you bring in through links? It has nothing to do with search engine optimization.

Your search engine optimization plan should be able to succeed without getting one backlink. Why? Because you cannot count on any backlink to ever be there when you need it to be.

How to Build Useful Backlink Profiles

In search engine optimization, backlink profiles are not concerned with numbers of backlinks. That is one of the hardest lessons for people to learn. Numbers of backlinks tells you absolutely nothing useful for search engine optimization. When you set out to build a backlink profile, you need to focus on where the links are, what they are doing, and why they exist.

People will link to Web sites for the stupidist of reasons. Many people, when just creating a Web site with no real idea of what to do with it, will pad out the site’s content with links to Web sites they find in search engines. There is no real purpose to such sites, and one should hope the search engines ignore such sites. Unfortunately, search engines will grant a lot of credibility to these little “puff sites”.

People will also link to Web sites as favors to friends, relatives, colleagues, and even strangers who make impassioned pleas. The sites don’t particularly interest the linkers but links are cheap. They don’t mean anything, so most people will provide links for the flimsiest of reasons.

People will also link to sites they feel provide support or explanation for points they make in their own content. Although these citation links really have no authoritative value they are most often the links that search engines use to identify authoritative Web content (and don’t confuse that with the mythical “authority site” many SEOs speak of in their day dreams).

Finally, people will link to sites they genuinely believe are worth while and fully deserving of being promoted and shared in every way possible. There are relatively few sites that earn many of these links.

Your first link profile for any Web site should divide all the inbound links you can find into those four categories. It will be sufficient if you can identify 5-10 of each type of link. If you can show that a site has at least 10 stupid, flimsy, citation, or recommendation links then you’ve shown enough about that site’s general link profile that you can move on to the next step.

Search engine data is not interchangeable. No credible link analysis will ever use data from one search engine to build a link profile for another search engine. So all those tips and tutorials that have been telling you for years to “just use Yahoo! to check your Google backlinks” are full of nonsense and bacon fat.

You cannot use Yahoo! to study your Google backlinks. Nor can you use the link: query operator to study your Google backlinks. You can log into Google Webmaster Central, authenticate your site, and look at all the useless link data Google provides you; or you can perform URL reference queries and get an idea for which links Google knows about.

Why is the Google Webmaster Central link data useless (for building a link profile)? Because Google won’t tell you which links pass value. That’s important to know. Any link that doesn’t pass value in a search engine index might as well not be in the search engine index (as far as search engine optimization is concerned).

Not every link matters. You need to understand that each search engine values links differently. Ask strives to group Web sites by topic, so a link discussing cats won’t help your page about dogs very much. Yahoo! says that the first link from a domain counts more than the others. Which one is the first? In what way(s) does it count more than others from the same domain?

Google won’t pass link value from Supplemental Results pages. But it may not pass link value from pages in the Main Web Index. In fact, Google may only pass value from a subset of links on a Web page. Did you know that? Do you know how to tell if a link passes value?

Profile the links that pass value. Who is passing anchor text? Who is passing PageRank? Who is passing trust? What qualities do those pages have in common that other linking pages don’t share? (In search engine optimization) knowing which links pass value is more important than knowing how many pages link to your content. There are other types of value links may possess (and pass) that have nothing to do with search engine optimization.

Why should you build backlinks?

If you have a new Web site, you want to get a few inbound links from trusted Web sites to help validate your pages. You also want to submit an XML Sitemap to those engines that will accept it, and you want to ensure that your internal linkage is sufficient to keep crawlers coming back and asking for more pages on a continual basis.

If you have decided to compete for a hyperoptimized expression most SEOs will tell you that you have two choices: find a less optimized niche expression that is closely related to the hyperoptimized expression; or else go on a link building rampage and hope you can outrank the other link builders.

In most cases there are two other options: first, you can try to win the game on content alone. I’ve seen people pull this off with massive pages that just hammer the keywords using enough surrounding text to make it clear they are extraordinarily long Web pages. Second, you can try a combination of heavily optimized content and links.

There are no guarantees you’ll break into a highly optimized query even if you build huge, highly repetitive pages and grabs tons of value-passing links. Your chosen competitors will probably be watching for newcomers.

There are fundamental Web marketing reasons for building backlinks: they’ll improve your visibility; they’ll build your credibility with people; they’ll send you traffic. Those are all good reasons to build backlinks.

But they have nothing to do with search engine optimization.

If you cannot optimize a Web page without relying upon links, you cannot optimize a Web page. It’s that simple.

Backlinks are the seasoning you add to the steak. You still have to cook the steak. You should understand how the seasoning helps improve the steak’s flavor, but the steak itself has to show that it is a good steak.

Just because most SEOs today will tell you that looking at how many backlinks a Web site has will help you doesn’t mean they know what they are talking about. They don’t. There is nothing useful in knowing how many backlinks a Web site has, until you can glance through a small selection of those links and see the pattern of distribution.

Your backlink profile should be a predictor of where a site’s links come from, not a catalogorized inventory list detailing every link and placement.

Your backlink profile should show you what a Web site’s strengths are. You should never look at Toolbar PR or even think in terms of PageRank. If you’re competing in a query where PageRank matters, you’ll lose. The guys on top are hundreds of thousands of links ahead of you.

Your backlink profile should show you how a search engine sees your Web site’s visibility, not how you think the Web site should be visible.

In short, a useless backlink profile is an indicator, not a metric. If you’re trying to use backlinks as a metric, you’re wasting your time. They will tell you nothing useful.

Look for the real information. Look for the value. Look at who is linking to a site and why.

Read more articles in this series:

1. Backlinks: The Beginner’s Guide to Backlink Theory
2. Backlink Profiles: More Backlinks for Beginners
3. Backlink Theory: Building Links From The Ground Up
4. Backlink Theory: Shaping Your Link Profile
5. Backlink Theory: HTML Sitemaps, XML Sitemaps, RSS Feeds, and More