Most websites that you visit aren’t “dead ends.” You can almost always leave a webpage without entering something new into your browser’s address bar: You just have to click on a link somewhere on the page. Websites have internal links (which, as the name suggests, link to other places within the same domain name) and, in many cases, external ones. Some links open up your email client or, if you’re using your smartphone, prompt a phone call. The internet is full of links. And, as it turns out, they are important.
You probably use links sometimes, but you probably also use other methods of finding what you need on the internet. For favorite websites, you might select a browser bookmark or just enter the site’s URL in your browser’s address bar. And, often, you probably just search for things on Google.
You’re not alone. Google fields around 10 billion search queries each month from users in the United States alone. That’s a lot of people looking at lists of links that Google provided. And, as we’ll soon see, those results pages aren’t the only part of this equation where links loom large.
How Google relies on links
To see just how important links are, we need to understand how Google works. Google’s top-secret algorithm decides how to rank search results for queries; but, before Google can do that, it needs to know what’s out there on the internet. To find and catalog sites, Google uses specialized computer programs nicknamed “spiders” or “web crawlers.”
Search engine spiders are designed to “crawl” the web: They read webpages and then move on to a new page using links. If internet linking didn’t exist, Google would have to come up with some other way to find and record details about every site it offers in its results.
Google loves links
Links are not just how Google gets around, though. As search engines check out sites, they’re also evaluating them. Only one site can take the top spot in the Google results for each search query, and Google wants to make sure that it’s feeding all of the important details into its algorithm.
What sorts of important details does it seek? Well, links, for one thing. The very same things that search engines spiders use to get around are also a critical part of what search engine algorithms take into account.
Search engines like Google can learn what a site is about in a few different ways, but links are certainly among them. If a lot of websites link to a single other website with the word “newspaper” in the linked text, Google can be pretty sure that the site being linked to is a news site. The same logic applies to all sorts of sites.
Links also tell Google how trusted a site is. Lots of websites link to stories in The New York Times, so Google quite reasonably assumes that The New York Times must be a pretty trustworthy source. And that, in turn, means that when The New York Times links to another site, that matters a lot. See, not all links are the same: Links from highly reputable sites (or, at least, sites that Google sees as highly reputable) matter the most.
Search engine optimization
Links are clearly important, and this means something for your business. After all, being high on Google’s search results pages is important for finding customers these days. That’s why it pays to hire search engine optimization experts who can offer you link building services and perfect other areas of your online presence.
