The Importance of Links

by Lee Asher, 1/12/2006

There are few more important factors in your website's success than the people who link to it. But why are links so important, and how can you get more people to link to you?

Built on Links

The early web was built on links: if people wanted to go to websites other than the ones whose addresses they knew by heart, the only way they had of getting there was to follow links. Eventually, whole directories of links started to be built, like the early Yahoo directory. These acted as the gateways to the web.

Rapidly, though, this reliance on links started to be replaced by a reliance on search. Instead of first going to a link directory, users started using search engines that made it easier to find what they were looking for. They would still follow links at the sites they got to, but it didn't take them long to click 'home' and get back to the search engine to start all over again. This created a web where links gradually seemed to matter less and less, and the big directories were forced to turn themselves into search engines.

The Rise of PageRank

What Google did when it invented PageRank was to take the search engine and make it pay attention to links. Old search engines relied heavily on unreliable and easily-gamed measures like meta tags and keyword density. PageRank added link popularity into the mix, meaning that your website's ranking would now be influenced by the number of links pointing to it.

What effect did this have? Effectively, it significantly changed the way the web works: instead of users having to choose between searching the web or following links, they now have search engines that follow links for them and try to decide which ones are the most suitable. As you can imagine, this was a big step forward.

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