At the dawn of Internet search, search engines such as Yahoo! and Excite used to rank sites in a wonderfully archaic way: by reading them. These simple search engines would crawl the Web and index all the words on those sites, then compare that index to a certain magical number. If your site used the right words the right number of times, you had a pretty good chance of ranking highly for those words.
Guess what happened? An entire wave of "content factories" cropped up overnight, advertising bulk page production with something called "optimal keyword density." Did you want to rank higher for the phrase “best whirlpool dishwashers”? Get someone to write a few hundred pages using that exact phrase really often. Bingo: number one ranking. It hardly mattered if the pages were interesting, or well-written, or frankly even legible. The first search algorithms were looking at keyword frequency and nothing else. And the content factories had their number — literally.
What followed was predictable: spam content began filling every corner of the Web, clogging the search engines with hundreds of thousands of articles that were clearly written for computers instead of human beings. It became increasingly difficult to find substantive content.
Google's Big Idea
Then Google came along with a better idea: instead of ranking sites by the number of times they used a given phrase, why not rank sites by the number of people who linked to them instead? After all, human beings are not as easily fooled as search bots, so presumably all those links implied genuine thought and judgment. Google's big idea was to treat the Web like a popularity contest, based on the notion that people only link to sites that are relevant or interesting. It was one of the first examples of so-called “crowd-sourcing” — relying on the wisdom of the masses to solve a complicated problem.
It worked: Google quickly became known as the most relevant search engine on the Web. Their revolutionary idea solved the problem of keyword stuffing in one fell swoop, and wiped out an entire industry overnight.
Since that time, Google’s algorithm has evolved considerably to sniff out "illegal" links, but this basic idea — that links are the best indicators of relevance — is today written into the DNA of all three big search engines.
So links matter. A lot. In fact, the quantity and quality of your inbound links is by far the biggest factor in determining your site’s search rankings. The more links you earn from other sites, and the more links you earn from RESPECTED sites, the higher your site will rank across the board.
So the million dollar question is: how to reel in these coveted links? The short answer that you must earn those links with high quality, substantive content and tireless outreach. The SEO experts of Breakthrough Content can show you how.