What is the importance of external links to SEO
An external link is a link that points at an external domain.
• Top SEOs believe that external links are the most important source of ranking power.
• Search engines consider them as a third party vote.
• Top SEOs don’t believe that “title” link attribute is used for ranking purposes.
Many top SEOs agree that getting external links is one of the most important strategies to attaining high ranks. This comes from the idea that getting external links is one of the hardest metrics to manipulate, and therefore, one of the best ways for search engines to determine the popularity of a given webpage. This idea was first used by the search engine Alta Vista and then later improved by Google.
If you think of external links as being votes, every time someone linked to your site, it would be like receiving a vote. If you only had a few links pointing back to your site, the search engines would think that the information on your site isn’t very good, as not many people will be ‘voting’ for you. Just like receiving votes, the more you have the more you will succeed, and in this case, getting to the top of search engine rankings.
Today, the major search engines use many advanced metrics to determine the value of external links. Some of the metrics include:
• The trustworthiness of the linking domain.
• The popularity of the linking page.
• The relevancy between the source page and the target page.
• The anchor text used in the link.
• The amount of links to the same page on the source page.
• The amount of domains that link to the target page.
• The amount of variations that are used as anchor text to links to the target page.
• The ownership relationship between the source and target domains.
In addition to these metrics, external links are important for two main reasons:
1. Popularity
Whereas traffic is a “messy” metric and difficult for search engines to measure accurately, external links are both a more stable metric and easier to measure. This is because traffic numbers are stored in private server logs while external links are publicly visible and easily stored. For this reason and others, external links are a great way of determining the popularity of a web page. This metric is combined with relevancy metrics to determine the best results for a given search query.
2. Relevancy
Links provide relevancy clues that are incredibly valuable for search engines. The anchor text used in links is usually written by humans, who can interpret web pages better than computers and is usually highly reflective of the content of the page being linked to. This will be a short phrase (e.g., “Online Marketing Croydon”) or the URL of the target page (e.g., http://www.online-marketing-croydon.com).
The target and source pages and domains cited in a link also provide valuable relevancy metrics for search engines. Links tend to point to related content. This helps search engines establish knowledge hubs on the Internet that they can then use to validate the importance of a given web document.
External Recources
http://moz.com/learn/seo/external-link
Digital marketing expert Croydon
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