Backlinks
Comments(0)Backlinks
Backlinks are incoming links to a website or web page. The number of backlinks is an indication of the popularity or importance of that website or page. In basic link terminology, a backlink is any link received by a web node (web page, directory, website, or top level domain) from another web node. Backlinks are also known as incoming links, inbound links, inlinks, and inward links.
Search engines often use the number of backlinks that a website has as one of the factors for determining that website’s search engine ranking. Websites often employ various techniques (called search engine optimization) to increase the number of backlinks pointing to their website.
Most commercial search engines provide a mechanism to determine the number of backlinks they have recorded to a particular web page. For example, Google can be searched using link:wikipedia.org (or link:en.wikipedia.org) to find the number of pages on the Web pointing to http://wikipedia.org/.
Yahoo!’s Site Explorer and Microsoft’s Live Search are methods of obtaining the number of backlinks on a site.
When HTML was designed, there was no explicit mechanism in the design to keep track of backlinks in software, as this carried additional logistical and network overhead. Some website software internally keeps track of backlinks. Examples of this include most wiki and CMS software. Other mechanisms have been developed to track backlinks between disparate webpages controlled by organizations that aren’t associated with each other. The most notable example of this is TrackBacks between blogs.
