Search engines do not rank website randomly, websites are not a stack of leaves that search engines throw in the air and rank who lands first at the top. There is a very complicated formula that search engines use to rank website “ranking algorithm” this algorithm uses hundreds of metrics to decide the order of sites that it will be returned for each query.

In this post I will focus on a metric that is heavily used to rank sites in all major search engines algorithms which is inbound links

“Think of links as a de facto endorsement. When you link to a site, you are endorsing that site. A site that links to your site is endorsing you. These links implicitly state that, “I, webmaster of my site, believe the value of the content at the site I am linking to will be useful to my customers.” That’s optimally why sites link out to one another, which is a good thing”. Quote from Bing

Here is what search engines say about inbound links:

- Bing

Bing has published recently a well crafted document explains the benefit of inbound links, I will quote some interesting paragraphs from this document:

Lord Alfred Douglas once said, “All good poetry is forged slowly and patiently, link by link, with sweat and blood and tears.” He could have just as easily been talking about high-ranking websites (had he known about them — his quote pre-dates the 1920s!). The way to search engine optimization (SEO) success is neither fast nor simple (not that it has to be hard, though). But the accumulation of valuable, relevant, inbound links from authority sites to your site is a sure-fire way to improve your site’s ranking with search engines.

There is another one where Bing stress again the importance of quality content, however when two websites have equally good content links will be used to make the ranking decision:

“The rank of two sites on the same topic offering equally good, original content will be differentiated in the SERPs by the inbound links they get externally,”

- Goolge:

“webmasters can improve the rank of their sites by increasing the number of high-quality sites that link to their pages. For more information about improving your site’s visibility in the Google search results”    read the whole post.

- Yahoo:

Yahoo is still busy to figure out how to make more money from ads (not sure if they even have enough traffic to funnel to the advertisers sites) in result they did not have enough time to publish any document to explain more for business owners or webmasters how does their algorithm work. The good news for us is that Bing will be empowering Yahoo search next year so consider what Bing said applied to Yahoo.

Tags: backlinks, Bing, Google, inbound links