Backlinks: 4 reasons this is still the biggest commodity in SEO

If you hear anyone mention SEO, it would be fair to say that the term “backlinks” is probably going to be brought up shortly after.

While we are not going to dive into a full history of Google, let’s not forget that this was their initial USP. They were able to rank webpages much more logically than any other competitor and as a result, they have built a multi-billion-dollar business on the back of it.

At the same time, there are questions as to why are backlinks important for a lot of companies. It can be expensive, and particularly now times are changing, some have questioned just whether Google need these links to rank their results. Today is all about showing that they are absolutely still a crucial factor, as we showcase four reasons to highlight this point in question.

They are the top-ranking factor in Google

Let’s not pull any punches with this first point, if you want to rank in Google then you need backlinks.

While the search giant are often secretive about their algorithms, even they haven’t been able to hide behind this. They have claimed that they have tried to ignore backlinks in some tests, but the results are far inferior to what they have now. As such, if you want to rank well on Google, your website needs backlinks.

They help Google find new pages

This next point is perhaps something that a lot of people don’t quite grasp when it comes to links. A lot of people just focus on the previous issue, which focused around how websites are ranked based on their backlinks.

However, they are also an excellent way for the search engine to discover new pages. Particularly if you have a new, or small site, this can be invaluable and help Google with their crawling and indexing tasks.

They help Google with reputation management

This is one of the more recent developments with Google, with their algorithms becoming a bit smarter in relation to reputation management. In the past, this was something that they found exceptionally difficult to judge. Now, times are changing, and they are able to assess the sentiment of links a lot more easily. It means that it’s crucially important that you don’t just build “any” links, but ones that build positive sentiment. In other words, if you are subjected to a terrible case study, this is more than likely going to work against you based on the new way in which Google works.

They drive traffic to your website (sometimes)

We’ve put the “sometimes” caveat into this final point, as we all know that not all links are able to drive traffic. Those that do can be very powerful though, usually because this goes hand-in-hand with all sorts of other metrics that we assess links by.

Even if you don’t feel that immediate jolt from a boost in rankings, if you are building backlinks on pages which receive traffic it should still be very positive for your business. You are at least receiving direct traffic which, in the grand scheme of things, is the overall aim for SEO.