The connection of referrers and backlinks to SEO services
If you’re working on your search engine optimization (SEO), what do you need to know about referrers and backlinks.
When examining your website, it is useful to know that a referrer is the website that is the source of a link, or perhaps several links, to your site. Every link on the referrer’s homepage is called a backlink, which means that you might look up this data and discover more backlinks to your site than referrers. For instance, one referrer site might have five backlinks.
Now think about site visitors. Your site statistics will show referrers, and that is the place a visitor was when they clicked a link to get through to your site. In Google Analytics, you’ll see referrer statistics, and that means you can see the location from which the visitor reach your site (the location is the “referrer”).
So, there are two definitions. One version is that a referrer site is a site with a link to your site. The second version is that a referrer site is a site with a link that a visitor to your site clicked on.
An SEO (search engine optimization) company will probably want to report the first kind of referrer to its clients: Any site with a backlink should be counted in SEO reporting. This is because no one needs to click on a link in order for that link to have value. In fact, an excellent SEO company should work hard to make sure those referrers exist in adequate numbers.
Backlinks help to generate authority. When someone links to you, search engines interpret that to means your site has something of value to say, is worth linking to, and therefore is worth finding in search engine results. Its kind of like when I write an article about, say, clowns, and use a footnote to reference the American Journal of Clown Laughology. By using that footnote, Im saying that the American Journal of Clown Laughology is important to the subject matter. It has authority. Therefore, backlinks have a powerful impact on your search engine ranking, and are vital in that quest for page one!
People tend to assume that Google provides easy access to referrer data. It doesn’t. Using link:nameofwebsite.com in Google gives you only a small percentage of your total number of backlinks, although Google Webmaster Tools does a better job of this. I prefer to use Yahoo to find this information, and based on Yahoo’s data, I can estimate (or guesstimate) my Google data. In Yahoo, type link:http://www.nameofwebsite.com. From here you can filter the data for the whole site, for homepage only, and exclude or include internal (from you to you) links. SEO companies sometimes spare their clients this effort by including that information in their reporting.
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