Referrers and Backlinks in SEO
If you’re working on your search engine optimization (SEO), what do you need to know about referrers and backlinks.
When examining your website, it is useful to know that a referrer is the website that is the source of a link, or perhaps several links, to your site. Every link on the referrer’s homepage is called a backlink, which means that you might look up this data and discover more backlinks to your site than referrers. For instance, one referrer site might have five backlinks.
Now think about site visitors. Your site statistics will show referrers, and that is the place a visitor was when they clicked a link to get through to your site. In Google Analytics, you’ll see referrer statistics, and that means you can see the location from which the visitor reach your site (the location is the “referrer”).
Those two definitions have a subtle difference. One says that referrer is anyone with a link, one says that a referrer is anyone with a link that someone clicked.
When reporting to its clients, an SEO services company may very well prefer to use the first definition; a referrer is a site with backlinks to your site. You see, even if no one ever clicks a particular link, its still important to you. In fact, making sure you have those links is a vital part of the work done by an SEO services firm.
Backlinks help to generate authority. When someone links to you, search engines interpret that to means your site has something of value to say, is worth linking to, and therefore is worth finding in search engine results. Its kind of like when I write an article about, say, clowns, and use a footnote to reference the American Journal of Clown Laughology. By using that footnote, Im saying that the American Journal of Clown Laughology is important to the subject matter. It has authority. Therefore, backlinks have a powerful impact on your search engine ranking, and are vital in that quest for page one!
It may surprise you to learn that its not easy to determine the number of referrers you have in Google. Many times you’ll see people recommend typing link:www.yourhomepage.com into Google, but that usually gives you only a small portion of your real total. Google Webmaster Tools gives you a more accurate reading. In general, I prefer looking at Yahoo, which will give me a good sense of how SEO is going for both search engines. Type link:http://www.yourhomepage.com into Yahoo to see the results. You can check referrers to the home page only or to the entire site, and you can exclude links from your own site. A good SEO company might provide that information to you more easily.