Why Are Links So Important to Your Online Success?

Here are two quick reasons:
1. They are “Spider Food”!
Links are essential in order to get your new sites spidered by the search engines and get your sites indexed so that they can begin to rank for your target search terms.
After all, you can have the greatest product in the world but if nobody can find it or even knows anything about it, you aren’t going to make any sales!

2. They Help Your Pages Build Relevancy!
Links are a major way search engines determine how relevant your web pages are for search terms. By building links from relevant websites, you are helping

ensure your site gets spidered and indexed by the search engines and ranked accordingly.
Building relevant links to your web pages is the number one thing you can do to improve your search engine rankings.
You see, obtaining high search engine rankings is fast becoming not just about having as many links to your site as possible, but having as many quality, relevant links to your site as possible.
To further explain this concept, we should take a close look at …

The Google Patent

Why is the U.S. Google Patent one of the single most important documents published in the past decade?
Here’s why: This paper reveals a great deal of information on how to rank in Google and gives us some idea of the direction Google is trying to go and what they are going to be looking for in the future.
What we know about Google is that they rely heavily on inbound links to help rank websites for given search terms. The good thing is that through the Google Patent they have now explained how it all works!
Google has long been known to look at the number, quality and anchor text as factors in weighing the value of a link. But it has now come to light that Google also considers historical factors in their computations.
This explains the theory of the “Google sandbox” or what can also be described as the aging of a new website before it will begin to rank in the index. This countdown begins the minute links to a brand new site are discovered.

Google apparently records:

 When the link is first discovered
 If that link changes over time
 And the speed at which a site gains links

Why is this new information important? Because it’s now clear that obtaining too many links too fast can cause your site to be shoved in the sandbox and possibly be de-indexed by Google.

Let’s now take a closer look at how to avoid setting off any alarms when building links.

Setting Off Alarms

As you have probably noticed, it’s becoming harder and harder to build enough links to your websites to make a difference in the search engines. There is continually more competition and Google is continually improving their spam filters to penalize your link building efforts.
To succeed today, you must grow your links steadily and slowly to keep from “setting off any alarms.” You must also be mindful of where you are obtaining your links from and if those sites are “relevant.”
If you go out and obtain thousands of links to a brand new site you are almost guaranteed to get your site shoved in the sandbox and possibly ignored.
Your goal now, when building links, should be to make that link growth appear as natural as possible.
In the following sections, I will share 5 backlink secrets that you can use to help ensure your sites’ link growth appears natural and to prevent your websites from “setting off any alarms.”