What are Links and Why are they Important?

So what are these link things and why do we keep banging on about links and how important they are?

Well you probably already know that a link is the bit you click on to navigate around the web and find your way to other sites. You will probably have noticed that we have mentioned that getting links to your site is important, but not be quite sure why.

Well in the same way that links let you find your way around the web, they are also the way that Google finds it’s way around the web to see what is out there. Google sends these little programs called Google-bots out onto the web and they simply follow every single link they can (or are allowed to) navigate. This tells Google what is out there, but this is only half the story – now Google knows what is out there, how do they know where to put it in the search results and what content is the best and deserves to go at the top of the results?

To achieve this Google’s algorithm uses several measures to determine where to rank you, but essentially these fall into two broad areas; On-Site (or On-Page for the specific page) and Off-Site.

On-Site is the actual stuff you put on your website; the words, images, and how you connect it all together, which we cover elsewhere. The most famous part of the Google algorithm relates to the use of off-site metrics by way of links to your site from other sites on the web.

Now, to explain why this is important I need to briefly explain how a link works. If you are familiar with this, feel free to skip this paragraph, but when someone links to your site it will look something like this Tulett.com are wonderful web designers. Within this are several elements, but the most important are the page that the link points to, in this case it is our home page, and what is called the anchor text, which in this case is “Tulett.com are wonderful web designers”. Between them it tells you where to go to and what the page being linked to is about.

So when Google finds a link to another site it takes it as a vote for the page it links to, as the site must have put it there because it liked the content it being linked to. However Google has realised that not all links are created equal.

Google looks at the link to see what the anchor text says and how relevant the page it is on is to the page being linked to. In addition, Google looks to see how many people link to the page with the link on, how established it is etc. and in turn how relevant those pages are etc. When Google adds all these various pieces of data together it can work out how strong the vote for your site is.

So let’s say that you are a school football coach in Bristol and you got a link from FIFA.org or a big coaching body containing the anchor text “Joe Bloggs coaches football at St Anywhere School in Bristol”. This link carries lots of weight as it is both relevant and from an important site in the world of football. Even better it contains anchor text that is strongly related to you and your site, so this is going to propel you up the search rankings.

On the other hand, lets say that someone made a mistake and misspelled the domain name in the link and accidentally linked to you from a brand new site about flower arranging with anchor text “petunias arranged as a giraffe” then this would carry very little weight as the site is new and has little authority and is not relevant.

Naturally the links you get to your site will usually fall in between these extremes, but this is how Google knows that sites like Amazon have nothing to do with Brazilian rainforests, but selling books etc. As you can see from this, if you get a good link to your site, then change your domain name, you effectively lose this recommendation and any others that point to your site.

Additionally if your site structure changes and the page that the link points to is not longer there, Google or anyone else following the link will be presented with “404 – Page Not Found” which is not what you want either as users will be annoyed and Google will realise the page is not relevant to the link…not good!

Since getting these links should be part of any promotion strategy for your site, it means that the domain name you promote becomes ever more valuable to you, so make sure you keep control of it!

Additionally, you need to be sure that the structure for your site is right from the outset or will not affect the URL (the URL is link to the specific page on a site, for example the one for this page is http://tulett.com/what-are-links-why-important)