One Way Links - What Is The Big Deal?

Are you a newcomer to online marketing? You may keep hearing about the importance of backlinks and one way links, and you may have some confusion regarding what they are and what they do.

If you are curious or confused, you will not be, by the end of this article. The bottom line is the more one way links you get, the better the search engines will treat you. You'll get more organic search engine traffic.

A backlink, or back-link if you're from the UK, is a link to a website. It is any link, from any site, other than from the site itself. If you have a website and you link from one page to another page, that is not a backlink. If you have two websites and you link from website A to website B, that is a backlink.

The term one way link, is referring to a one way backlink. Backlink and one way link, mean the same thing.

If your friend has a website and he links to your website, that would be one way link, or a backlink. If you return the favor and link to his site, it would be a two way link and it would make his link to your site worthless, in terms of impressing the search engines. If you did not return the favor by linking to your friend's site after he linked to yours, you would retain your coveted backlink, or your one way link.

Back in 1996, the project called BackRub, that would go on to turn into the corporation, Google, did something unique. Among other things, it placed importance on the number of inbound links that websites have. The assumption is, if a site is very important, it is going to get linked to, quite a bit.

The number of incoming links (backlinks) was made among the most important things that determined the kind of treatment the website would receive in the search results. For a number of years, after BackRub became Google, a two way link was just as good as a one way link, generally speaking.

When internet marketers realized this, they started creating link pages where they would link to your site, if you linked to their site. This early method of search engine optimization (SEO) worked very well.

It didn't take long for other search engines to follow the leader regarding the importance of links, by the way. However, when Google realized that there was so many webmasters who were spending so much time on getting meaningless 2 way links, and no time on creating quality content, they changed there algorithm, rendering those types of links to have no value in terms of search results. The other search engines followed them again.

The question is, how can you get one way links from other websites? You should always strive for great content and keep adding to it. This will cause other website owners to link to your site, but it is a slow process. You need to get a head start, and the best way to do that is by publishing articles at article directories, and link to your website from your articles. The more articles you publish, the better you should do.