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Why Inbound Links are valuable

Now that you know why inbound links are important to the success of your site, let's have a look at the importance Google gives to links.

Why does Google value links?

The simple fact of the matter is that Google (and other Search Engines) rank your site higher if it has a number of inbound links. The Search Engines assume that links to and from other sites indicate other site owners in your area of interest consider your site worth looking at. Therefore, the more inward pointing links you have, the more your site is viewed as important and a good source of information for your specific target audience.

This was the thinking that led the founders of Google to develop the "Page Rank" system. That is why Google and most of the other major Search Engines generally give a ranking to sites with a number of incoming links — especially if they are from relevant high traffic sites.

Page Rank and "Relevancy"

These days, Search Engines can analyze the text on web pages and draw conclusions about the subject matter of that text. This is especially the case with Google. In fact this analysis does two slightly different things.

First, it draws some general conclusions about the subject matter of the entire page. And second, it draws some fairly specific conclusions about the subject matter of link text -- the text surrounding each link -- including the anchor text itself ("anchor text" is the actual text that is linked, for example this is anchor text. This allows the SEs to compare pages and links according to subject matter, and to determine the relevance of links to the pages they are linked to. As I mentioned above, a link from a "relevant" site is given more weight by Google than just any old link.

For example, let's say your site is about Golden Retrievers. Incoming links from other content discussing Golden Retrievers, dogs, or pet care will be considered "relevant" to your site. The more the link text pointing at your site site focuses on pets, and particularly Golden Retrievers, the more "relevant" it is considered to yours.

These links, along with the actual content of your site, are analyzed by Google to arrive at what is called your Google Page Rank. So the more links you have from "relevant" sites, the better your Page Rank.

In other words Google uses a number of important factors to arrive at a ranking for your site. First is the actual content of your site — analyzed in terms of keywords and key phrases. Second is the number of inbound links to specific pages. Third is the Page Rank of the pages linked to yours. And fourth is the relevance of the inbound links to yours.

This has a direct bearing on your link exchange strategy. You should not just pile up the links. That will not help your incoming traffic, and will not help your Google Page Rank. You should look for links from relevant sites, and particularly ones with a high Page Rank. And if you are creating the link text, you should write it so it is as relevant as possible to the subject matter of the page it is pointing to.

In the second part of this article I will discuss some strategies for finding and linking to the kind of sites that will give you the most benefit.

NOTES
From Anatomy of a Search Engine, written by the founders of Google: "Another intuitive justification is that a page can have a high PageRank if there are many pages that point to it, or if there are some pages that point to it and have a high PageRank. Intuitively, pages that are well cited from many places around the web are worth looking at. Also, pages that have perhaps only one citation from something like the Yahoo! homepage are also generally worth looking at. If a page was not high quality, or was a broken link, it is quite likely that Yahoo’s homepage would not link to it."

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