by Josh, 8/17/2007

Backlinks are incoming links to a website and indicate importance or popularity of the website. In formal sense, backlinks connect webpages, and so when a webpage that links to another, it is taken as a 'vote of approval' by the former in favor of latter.

PageRank - presumably named so after Google's co-founder Larry Page - predates Google. That is the reason that while the name 'PageRank' is Google's trademark; the PageRank patent is assigned to Stanford University, where Larry Page and Sergey Brin researched on the subject before founding Google.

PageRank is a patented algorithm whereby numerical weighting is assigned to each set of hyperlinked texts in a document, for example a webpage. Looking from this angle, it would seem backlinks and PageRank complement one another. In other words, the more the backlinks a webpage has, greater will be its PageRank. Available evidence however does not always support this.

Google's rise as a search engine giant and its known emphasis on PageRank led people to build up mammoth quantity of backlinks to webpages. Link farms specializing in 'creating' backlinks in thousands crowded the scene and managed to make fast bucks in no time. To be true, many websites did flourish by exchanging or buying backlinks.

But axe was soon to fall. Today, after several rounds of Google's purging, the concept of reciprocal linking or mutual backlinks has firmly taken a backseat. So, how the picture looks like? Are backlinks passé? If not, what could you do to increase backlinks to your website so that ultimately your PageRank improves?