Backlinks help you rank for your targeted keyword. In turn, you'll get free visitors from Google and/or other search engines when your website gets the No.1 (or any other position within the first 10) position.

-Shaun

To build up your search engine rankings and make your site relevant for your desired keywords. Why do you assume it's such a negative thing?

A back link is in effect a vote for a website from another website, if there were no back link structure we would have no internet as it is now but a mass of unrelated pages spread all over the place with no clear way to navigate it.

And 100x the costs of domain registration as no revenues would be created since no real traffic would find its way around.

Without back links there is no internet.

And yes, I remember the early days before the whole www idea came into being, trying to find your way around was a nightmare as you could generally only find stuff by randomly punching keys and hoping you got lucky.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bulletin_board_system

You kinda said the answer in your question:

"What is the of Backlinks?"

so that they can back to yoursite, an increase your rankings.


You indirectly gave an answer in your own question lol.

To get traffic.

It's really to boost you up in rankings.

The intention on Google's part seems to be that backlinks are a good indicator of a site's popularity but like most other things it can and often is exploited.

Exactly, back linking is the great leveller.

If it wasn't possible the only companies online that could be found would be the likes of the major conglomerates with massive financial backing such as Microsoft, IBM or Dell that have the ability to advertise on a mass scale.

Back links are not the be all and end all of it though, you still need good content that people will appreciate, it simply makes it easier to find by telling people you are there.

Backlinks = traffic

You can get traffic from people visiting the links to your website. The holy grail is backlinks can help you increase your search engine rankings which will bring some traffic.

The idea behind links was to ensure the cream floats to the top due to the uniquely democratic nature of the web. The abuse of linking (well what else was mankind gonna do) means this is no longer the case.

The link based algo has gone to hell in a hand cart but I'm not seeing an obvious alternative. The more ridiculous the SERPs become the less viable Google becomes so it's up the egg heads in the Plex to figure a way of only counting real links. Think this isn't going to happen? Cool, you can think what you like

d

The more links a website has coming into it, the more authoritative and popular it
looks to the search engines, this leads to the website in question climbing the
search engine ranking. Also it helps to expanding your network of contacts so they
can lead to new customers or sales.

Jamian.

Number one is the the closest honest answer. However it doesn't have to be a trick if you really do have great content. In that case its a way to get noticed and then you can begin to get natural backlinks.

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It's basically high school all over again. It's a popularity contest. If you have 300 guys saying you're awesome, and website #2 has only 100 guys saying they're awesome, then guess who is more awesome?! and who gets the rankings?!

SEO is mostly about backlinks, where to get them, quality, quantity and so on.

Backlinks (besides your content) are the only thing telling google what your site is about. And backlinks from a relevant site is even better. and you need backlinks to rank (unless you target a keyword with no searches and upload an article to scribd and digg it.)

Sadly the Google Algo is like 90% driven by backlinks. I've seen some in-depth detailed tested done on "certain" forums which show that backlinks can over come zero SEO.

Backlinks=Rank
Spiders=Indexing
Both of the Above=Human Traffic