Importance of Backlinks with Search Engine Optimization

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What is a backlink and why are they important? Backlinks or Inbound Links (IBL’s) are links that are directed towards your website and are the building blocks to good Search Engine Optimization. The number of backlinks a website has is in a good indicator of its popularity or importance with search engines. Search engines, namely Google, give more credit to websites that have a larger number of quality backlinks and consider those websites more relevant in a search query.
It is not sufficient to just have a high number of inbound links; they need to be quality links. For search engines to determine the quality of inbound links the content of the site is critiqued. The content of the websites you have inbound links with needs to be relevant to the content on your site. The more relevant the inbound links are to your site helps determine the quality of the links. If your site is about breast implants than linking to a site about German Shepherds is not relevant and is therefore not a quality link.
It is easy to get a higher ranking using backlinks than it is to influence search engines with external backlinks from other sites, which is why backlinks matter so much in a search engines algorithm. Recently search engines criteria for quality inbound backlinks has gotten harder. This is due to people using deceptive tactics like hidden links or automatically generated pages whose entire purpose is to generate inbound links to other web pages. These pages are called “link farms” which aren’t ousted by search engines. Link farms could be harmful to your site if you backlink with them and may cause your site to be banned.