The Importance of Backlinks
Since it inception of search, backlinks have been an important contributor to rankings. Each backlink pointing to your website counts as a ‘vote’ for or in some cases against your site.
Backlinks pass authority, relevance and trust metrics from their donor site to yours. This means that a link from a high quality, highly regarded industry leader will help your rankings a great deal. By contrast, a link from a low quality site can have the opposite effect.
Google only count links from sites that are included in their own index. If Google don’t value the website enough for it to be included, then the link it offers you is going to at best be valueless, and at worst actually count against you.
Google deindexes millions of websites every year, have regular purges of their database of websites, removing all the sites which don’t meet their minimum criteria.
In many cases this can be because in between their purges your site has attracted new links from less desirable websites, incurring a penalty on your site.
Google’s Index
If your website is not included then you will never rank anywhere. It has never been more important to make sure that the quality of your backlinks is good. Just a few low quality links can be enough to harm your site.
Backlink Category
Each link carries a score from 0 – 100 depending on the strength of the backlinks that it has. This score is very important, because the higher the score of the links pointing to you, the higher your score will become.
While technically this is only important for the link strength of the links that you in turn pass to other sites, it is an important indicator of the overall strength and authority of your site.
As a rule, it is high scoring websites that rank highest for the most competitive search terms. Building high authority links is therefore a necessity for attracting high quality organic traffic.
Additionally, every site is given a category (based on the category structure used in the DMOZ directory). Analysis shows that in over 90% of searches, it is relevant category sites that rank at the top for the highest traffic search terms.
Your link category is determined by the category of the links that link to you. This means that you need to attract a bulk of your links from category specific websites….. find your ideal link categorisation at deehoseo.com and increase your organic traffic.
From Google’s point of view this makes sense, because high authority industry sites have a relevant category and pass relevant category links to you and others. If you have a good authority score and a relevant category, it implies that your site is highly relevant and can be trusted within your niche.
Google use this process to apply a trust score to the business behind the website…. which is ultimately what people are searching for.