As a newbie to this I had assumed that backlinks were our URL placed on other sites. Using various tools this does not appear to be the case at all!! According to googlerankings.com etc etc there is only 1 link to our site. I know for a fact that there are many more than that but they do not appear to have any effect. Is it worth me trying to put links to these sites onto my site in an effort to get them linked to my site or would I be wasting my time? How can I get these backlinks working for me?
There are several posts on this forum stating that Google does not show many backlinks for sites (hint: search this forum for prior postings ). To see a more comprehensive list of backlinks to your site perform the following search on Yahoo! ... "linkdomain:mysite.com -domain:mysite.com" (without the quotes and replacing your domain for the mysite.com). Backlinks are a significant factor in getting your site ranking in Google and other search engines. There are also other factors to consider (e.g. read about the Jagger update).