subject: Importance of SEO link building [print this page] In order to understand the importance of SEO link building, it is important to know different types of links. An average site is loaded with hundreds of individual Web pages, with the content related to the nature of the site. It may have external links which are also known as backlink and inbound links or incoming links. Both internal and external links have value. Internal links are crucial for ensuring that search engine knows about all of the pages on your site. Internal links ensure that the bot finds your links and indexes the pages while also providing users with easier navigation. External links play a crucial role in determining your site's PageRank, or PR. Sites with higher PR are considered more important than sites with low PR values. Search engines uses incoming links as "White-hat link building techniques" part of its criteria for setting a site's PR. Each incoming link is considered a "vote" for the website. The more links, the higher the likelihood that the site is relevant and authoritative.
In addition to looking at the number of backlinks pointing to a particular Web site, search engine also looks at which sites are casting these "votes." For example, if a site with a PR of 10 links to another site, that will carry more weight with search engine than a site with a PR of 0 linking to the same site. Google is impressed by higher PR sites because these sites tend to be well established, with many votes of confidence expressed via incoming links. PageRank and other criteria are used to determine where a site is listed in Google's search engine results pages when relevant keywords are entered by a user. Sites with higher PR fare better than those with lower PR because the higher PR sites are deemed more authoritative and relevant. Clearly, incoming links are important as they influence your site's potential position in the search results pages. However, not all incoming links are created equal. Because webmasters are aware of the value of links, link abuse has taken place. Link farms, essentially created sites for the sole purpose of boosting link popularity of participating sites, and other questionable linking techniques have prompted search engines to mark link farm links as spam. Participating in link farms could get your entire site banned. In addition to being penalized by Google and other search engines for dubious linking, there are two main types of incoming links to be aware of: "nofollow" and "do follow" links. Whether an incoming link is nofollow or do follow isn't necessarily going to hurt you as far as search engine is concerned, but the link's status determines whether or not search engine treats the link as a link or ignores it completely.
Originally, all incoming links were do follow links. The Googlebot would find a link, follow it, and add new site to its index. If the referring site had a high PR, the linked site would see some benefit from that strong vote of confidence. However, with the abundance of user generated content, going higher in the web ranking became easy and adding a comment or post a forum entry complete with links to their own sites. Not only did comment and forum spam become a problem, site owners resented lending credibility to random sites. In addition, while you aren't penalized when a dubious site links to you, you could be penalized when you link to a dubious site. If a link farmer visits your Web site and leaves a link to his link farm, you could be held accountable and penalized by the search engine. Because of issues like these along with the fact that each link that a site makes devalues the site's future links, the nofollow attribute was created. The nofollow attribute is a line of code that tells the Googlebot not to follow the link. When Google encounters a nofollow link, it is completely ignored. Therefore, the link has no value in terms of SEO. The nofollow link itself is clickable and can drive some direct traffic to your site, but it will not boost your PageRank or improve your chances of a higher position in the search engine results page. With that in mind, when you start your link building strategy, you will want to focus on building do follow links.
