From the course: Danny Sullivan on SEO

Are backlinks still important?

From the course: Danny Sullivan on SEO

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Are backlinks still important?

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- It's not uncommon for anybody with even a small degree of SEO knowledge to hear that links are important. And they are. Links are, in a way, how search engines count votes for whether a page is good or not. You can think of it as that is a candidate gets lots of votes, then that candidate wins the election. And from that, people then mistakenly assume, well, webpage gets lots of links or back links, then it'll win the election. But the reality is that the search engine world is slightly different. Every link does not count for the same. Some links are given more credit and more weight than others. And that makes sense. If you wrote something that was about a medical problem, and you had links from 10 medical websites pointing at you, those probably are trusted a lot more, and count a lot more than if you wrote something and it had 10,000 links pointing at you from general blogs and other places, but they didn't really have any qualifications. So the search engines are trying to weigh the links, and count the ones that make the most sense, and let them pass along the importance that they should. Search engines are also doing things like trying to understand what's the link saying? So, for example, if you search for books, and you get Amazon number one, part of that may be because there's a lot of people who point at Amazon with links, and say in the links, books, or say in or near the link, the word books. You search for cars, you don't get Amazon coming up number one. Not because they don't have a lot of links, but because they don't have a lot of links that are relevant and saying that they're about cars. That's some of what goes into the whole question about linking. The bottom line, though, to keep you out of trouble, and help you get the links you want is, if you are linking to a page, or wanting to get a link from a page, you should always keep in mind whether or not this is something one of your human visitors would want. Is there a website out there that has an audience that you think is interested in your site? If so, and you can get a link from that, great. But if you're looking at some of these schemes and mechanisms, and tools that will just get you hundreds and hundreds of links from random places, they're not only not that helpful for you, and probably not going to do the job that you think, but potentially they could get you into trouble with the search engines, and cause much more harm than good.

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