what EXACTLY is a backlink?

What is a backlink
A link is a hyperlink on your page to other's page. A backlink is reverse of that.
So you will call a hyperlink on other's page to yourpage as a backlink or linkback.
Why Important?
Backlinks are proofs that others are recommending your webpage. not only people come to your website by clicking those links, google and other search engines consider it and promote your page's position in those 10000000 search results. so more chances of getting huge free traffic from search engines.
Quality of backlinks
For search engine optimization, not all backlinks are equally important. For example if Yahoo website is somehow recommending or BBC news is recommending your website, it is much more effective than a newbie website is recommending you (it is also possible that you have contract with it). So Google and other search engines have a long algorithm which calculates quality of a backlink using many parameters.
Factors Affecting quality of a backlink

• Domain from which contains it
• text of the link anchor
• neighbourhood of the link
• relevence of the niche of souce and destination
• many more factots

 

Google has always been following 'if it allows misuse, then put blanket ban on it'. Backlinks are such like that. Anybody with money and connections can get others to backlink to them, whether for monetary consideration or not. The true worth of individual web page without backlinks is serp-tically ostracized by Google. Google puts ban on meta keywords ignoring them totally when there is every reason to index meta keywords. Lets say there are LSI keywords not mentioned on the page but the page fits that meaning. Where to put that meaning? In the meta keywords of course! Then why is Google ignoring meta keywords totally? Because it was used for spamming? then backlinks are used for spamming also. Google algorithm's dependence on links as a factor in ranking the true worth of a web page has been the cause of link spam and comment spam. Dependence on ther" people linking to your page should be removed as a factor deciding ranking. Other people may not link to you because they think you have unreasonable ideas, but your web page may be well worth a visit on its own. Anything that depends on 'other' people and not standalone human being is faulty by basis.

 

Thanks for sharing your knowledge. Really helpful post

 

A backlink is simply an incoming link to the website or a webpage.

 

I guess they all have given the answer for your question.. THat's why I agree with them..

 

alright, thanks guys! haha i wasnt expecting this many people to leave feedback =)

 

so when you say a newbie website, do you men a website that hasnt been around for very long, one that doesnt have quality content, or one that has a bad rating in alexa?

is a website with an alexa rank of 200,000 or less good/efficient?

 

One way to find places to add your backlink is to check your competitors backlinks - I learn about new niche specific directories and forums everytime I do this. Try either going to Yahoo and enter link:www.competitorssiteurl or try backlinkwatch.com

 

backlink is link from other site to your site which helps to increase pagerank as well as traffic along with visibility in search engine which resilut in improvement in ranking.
here anchor text plys an important as we place link on other site with anchor text.

 

Backlinks are links that google sees as being relevant to your site

 

cheers good info

 

I just meant "yet another website" means which is not here for long, less quality links and content, has bad neighborhood, using some bad seo tactic or something similar.

 

It's just links from other websites that point to your website. There are many ways to optimize these links in order to increase the "juice" you get from them and an easy one is to use the keywords you are targeting as anchor text.

 

A backlink is a link pointing to your site from other sites. It can help your site to increase your site popularity and pr.