I have noticed with my sites that just because I have a lot of backlinks does not mean I will get a lot of search engine hits. I have also noticed the opposite. My question to those of you who have an expertise in SEO is why is that?
Your backlinks should contain the anchor text match to the keyword\phrases you want to link for, you probably are ranking just not for the keyword or phrases you want.
Markon, backlinks are just one of the components of SEO. Make sure you've also got your on page factors in alignment.
Markon, ssandecki mentioned anchor text. Well your on page factors should be in alignment with whatever your doing off page.
Markon, Besides what has already been mentioned about a good anchor text link. A lot also has to do with the PR of the page linking back to you as well as if it is relevant to your industry/niche/ Let's say your niche is dog training and all your backlinks are from gaming sites. You will get a little credit from these links. However, if your backlinks were form let's say feline sites and pet food sites you would be given the full juice from the page rank of the page linking back to you. I hope that makes sense.
What about a site with few backlinks, but gets a lot of traffic. How is that explained? Perhaps I am not doing backlinks correctly. I go to Google search and type in site:domain of the site. However, if I go to http://www.domainpagerank.com/ I come up with zero at Google, but about 1,000 at Yahoo and Altavista each.
This is because the rankings not only depend on the number of links you have but on the quality of those links. If you have 5 links from some good quality pages of a good quality site then it is worthed a lot more than 50 links from bad quality sites. And the quality of links also depend on the relavancy of the topic from where the link is coming from, getting a link from a real estate site will not help you much in search engine rankings when you have web hosting company. Akash
What kind of pages link to you ? If I have 1000 links from spammy financial and viagra sites, it is as good as nothing right ? Quantity is important, but quality plays a very important role.
You could be getting your traffic from RSS feeds, or just your following that you have. There can be a lot of reasons for this one. AS far as using the Links: parameter in Google. I have never foundit to be accurate. I can type in my domain name and Google will show thousands of results, but when using link: you might get a couple hundred. To my knowledge it has never been accurate. I don't know why, it just isn't.