Back links have become so important to the scope of Search Engine Optimization, that they have become the main building block to good SEO. Thus by exploring the anchor text of a site’s back links, you will get an idea of your competitors’ link building strategy, understand what people think of the site and also get help with your keyword research (webmasters usually focus on their most important keywords when building links).
SEO
Outside of SEO, the back links of a web page may be of significant personal, cultural or semantic interest. These links indicate who is paying attention and to what page. While it is also true that search engines do not punish you if you have back links from link farms or black hat sites (because you have no control over what bad guys link to), if you decide to enter a link exchange program with the so called bad neighbors and you link to them, this can be disastrous to your SEO efforts.
Another thing with the SEO gurus is that many of the so called SEO guru’s have been known to show a lack of understanding regarding where page rank comes from, and how internal and external links distribute page rank between pages. Make sure your SEO professional shows a clear understanding of page rank and the effect of your site rankings on Google based on the external and internal linkage of your site.
Page rank
In the search engine optimization (SEO) world, the number of back links is one indication of the popularity or importance of that website or page (though other measures, such as PageRank, are likely to be more important). The scale for PageRank is logarithmic like the Richter Scale and roughly based upon quantity of inbound links as well as importance of the page providing the link. Google engineer Matt Cutts has publicly indicated that the Toolbar PageRank values are republished about once every three months, indicating that the Toolbar PageRank values are historical rather than real-time values. If you have an internal architectural problem and your PageRank is spread across thousands of pages of duplicate content then some of your good content will end up in Google’s supplemental results, and won’t rank for much.
Rankings
Rankings are important, but not the whole story. SEO should be judged by bottom-line improvement, not arbitrary Google rankings. Every month when the Google bots start re-indexing your website looking for new content and keywords, it’s always a good idea to keep track of how your Google rankings are going. However, there is a school of thought that says that interlinking between sites, such as 100 or so sites, on one server or IP can lead to lower rankings in Google. Google generally identifies a network of interlinked sites on one server as a link-farm and may penalize you based on that fact alone, so be careful where you link and who you link to.
