The Popular Obsession With Back Links in SEO
To say that most SEO folks are obsessed with back links would be something of an understatement. The fixation that most SEO folks have on back links drives most of them to engage in activities online they would never normally do otherwise. This article gives a brief history of back links, why they're considered important. However, don't be fooled! Despite what you read here, we at Connweb don't worry about back links at all. We don't try to track them down. We simply attract them by writing good content for your web site.
Defining Back Links
What are back links? Back links are nothing more or less than a link from another web site to your own web site. It seems strange that so many people could obsess about something as simple as back links, but that is what they do. Here is why.
A Brief History of Search Engines
When the Google revolution arrived in 1998, it absolutely shook up the search engine industry and changed it forever. Up until then, search was at best a dicey proposition. Someone searching for something was more likely to not find it than to actually find what they were looking for. The reason, oddly enough, was SEO.
The 1990s was the Yahoo! era. They were the dominant beast in the search engine market, although they were by no means the only players. AltaVista, Lycos, Excite, Infoseek, Magellan, Open Text, WebCrawler, HotBot, Ask Jeeves, and LookSmart were just some of the major players at the time.
Early SEO experts got so good at manipulating search engine results that a skilled SEO expert could literally put any web site at the top of the rankings for any search term or keyword. Thus, a search for a plumber would be more likely to result in web sites about weight loss or email marketing than about fixing your pipes.
The secret to success was quite simple. The search engines at that time took all their scoring cues from what webmasters put into the web site's pages. They ended up with a series of scoring questions like:
- Do the keywords appear in the meta keywords tag?
- Do the keywords appear in the page's title?
- Do the keywords appear in the headlines?
- How many popular keywords appear on the links?
- What is the density for each keyword, meaning how often does each keyword show up in the text?
- What is the keyword density for the keyword only within the headlines?
- Is the keyword bolded?
- Is the keyword in a different color from the rest of the text?
- Does the keyword appear higher up or lower down on the page?
And so on. It didn't take a great deal of cleverness to simply pound all your best keywords into the text, apply the latest SEO "tricks", and wait for the search engines to find your page. Meanwhile, the poor users kept getting more and more weight loss pages instead of plumbers pages. In fact, some of the pages they saw were nothing more than keyword-saturated pages that contained no useful information at all! Their sole reason for existence was to place well in the search results!
That was the situation when Larry Page and Sergey Brin were graduate students at Stamford University. They saw the state of the search engine field and came up with a way to make it better. Their idea became the basis for their doctoral thesis, and their supporting lab experiment was the first Google search engine server, located in the Stamford University computer lab.
As most people know, Google took off like a skyrocket almost from the moment it launched. The reason it succeeded was obvious. If you searched on the word "plumber", you would get back listings about plumbers, rather than weight loss specialists or marketing campaigns. Users loved it, and it made Larry and Sergey into billionaires.
PageRank: The Secret Sauce
The secret was in a mathematical formula they called PageRank. The name PageRank was a double entendre, a play on both Larry's last name and the fact that the formula introduced a new way to rank web pages. While the mathematical formula was rather complex for anyone who had trouble passing math classes, in truth the concept behind it was extraordinarily simple.
Instead of basing search results on what a webmaster did on his own web page, PageRank based the page's score on what other webmasters thought about that page, or more accurately what other pages "thought" about that page. The measurement was taken by looking at who was willing to link to that page. This seemingly mundane little innovation gave birth to the idea of "back links", and everyone ever since then have been doing anything they had to do in order to acquire the holy grails of the web.
Everyone, that it, except us. We have a better way!
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