Nothing drives me more insane than the lie that is still told about how important backlinks are!

Before I get too deep in this discussion, first let me explain what a backlink is and how it works. A backlink is a link on a website, forum, or anywhere on the Internet that links back to you. Simple enough, right? Well search engines come by, see that page that has you as a backlink, and takes note of it in how it formulates webpage relevancy and ranks websites, such as Google’s Page Rank (PR) service and Alexa.

Many years ago, scammers and bad people noticed that if tons of backlinks were automatically created through software automation or hiring overseas people 20 cents per post (not exaggerating this one bit – big business in Phillipines, Vietnam and Indonesia) to make a post on the Internet with a backlink to what they are trying to manipulate on search engines.

If you remember years ago, if you typed in “dog boarding” since the holidays are coming up or “NFL sports scores” you would have to sift through Viagra, porn and virus infested websites.

Google fixed this by updating their Panda algorithm, which is how they rank pages for search results, by taking less of a score by the amount of backlinks you have and more of how relevant the backlinks were. For instance, if you are a company involved in computers and consulting like I am, Google would see my links on other computer forums, computer websites and other relevant webpages as being “better” than backlinks being generated by automation.
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