Are backlinks important for high position in Google SERPs?
In this industry where the rules of SEO are contsantly changing, you hear some strange theories about search engine optimisation. One of the strangest is whether backlinks are important. There are those that believe the Google does not rely on backlinks anymore, and instead positions websites in order of importance and relevance by content alone. This is of course ridiculous, backlinks are of a massive importance for websites wishing to rise above the best in highly competitive searches.
Why?
As clever as Googles algorithm is, it is important to remember that Google is just a search engine and cannot understand the actual content. What Google does is to simply understand if the web page is well written and place the site under specific searches in accordance to keywords and sentences involved within the page.
Web designers who believe that Google doesn't use backlinks to help value the worth of a web page must think that Google is infact an intelligent life form that has the ability to think for itself, in which case 'judgement day' is apon us! Either that or Google must have an army of workers reading the content of hundreds of millions of web pages each and every day!
By websites linking to a web page shows Google that people value the information displayed within the page.
Now anyone could create a web page and link to their main site or gain plenty of backlinks from link farms, so Googles response was to create Page Rank. This allows Google to rank more respected sites higher than those that are abused. Simply put, the more backlinks from high Page Rank sites, the higher your site will appear on Google’s SERPs.
Although Page Rank is passed through backlinks, there are many web designers who don’t consider that each Page Rank is divided by the amount of outgoing links. Therefore it is much better to gain a backlink from a web page that has ten or twenty outgoing links compared to a page that has hundreds of links.
There are many web designers that waste so much time on getting backlinks from poor sources that offers very little as far as link juice. Two of these sources include forums and blogs. The main reason being is that vitually all forums and blogs (especially any decent ones) are nofollow.
nofollow is a piece of code that is placed on a link, which tells Google that this link doesn't value the information on that site and therefore no link juice is passed on. This has been designed by Google to stop webmasters spamming free post websites. By changing the link on your own web page to nofollow does not affect your websites Page Rank or position in the SERPs.
Many webmasters also believe that Google gives more weight to backlinks that have a higher CTR (click through rate). Therefore it is adviseable to try and gain backlinks from a site that is not only found under competitive searches (with a high amount of traffic), but also is relevant to your own website, as visitors are much more likely to click through.
Gaining decent backlinks is very hard and although many of the highly ranked websites may have thousands of backlinks, they may actually have only a hundred or so that are of any worth!