There is a lot of controversial banter about whether or not backlinks are good for seo or not, good for page rank or not. Many so called experts have been wrong and in order to advance your knowledge you need to know exactly what increases your search engine rankings, how to increase them and the best ways.

The bottom line is that with all search engines that actually crawl your website without request (such sites as Google. msn, yahoo) the value of the link is highly correlated with the niche type, if the link back is on the same niche as yours it is seen as a stronger backlink. However, multiple links from one website are valued differently than just one found on the home page. A common misconception is that having site wide links can lower rankings on search engines or hurt PR. The reality is simply that site wide links do not help a website a lot more than just a single link on the main page does. Typically, credit or link juice is received for the first link on the site, but the remainders of the links are not usually used for serp purposes but do give traffic bonuses from visitors of that site and increase PR. This is especially true when the links all have identical anchor texts and surrounding content, this is typical of blogs as they use a site wide system with widgets.

Yahoo and MSN value sitewide links differently. As of now, a sitewide link can be an extremely valuable asset and can increase a website’s position in the search engine results pages in the before mentioned search engines. However, it would come as no surprise if this changed in the future and the other engines adopted similar system to what Google use, if not turn into basically clones of Google itself.

In terms of just the Google search engine, links within content do hold a much higher value than those out of the main content section. Links contained within relevant body text typically carry a much heavier weighting than those that are located within the footer navigations or the sidebars of the page, this may have been adopted because of people abusing the link power system. The rationale behind this is quite simple, If the webmaster finds the resource (website) valuable enough than the link will likely be posted in the primary content area rather than along the footer or another place where visitors are less likely to actually visit the site.

Another factor that determines the power of a link back is using, as earlier mentioned, similar, if not exact, niche link backs. The idea is relatively simple, a shopping site would not link to a financial help website, and therefore, it would only be there if it was simply mentioned or paid to be there. Using this theory it could be easily assumed that, that link means less as compared to a website with a similar niche linking to your website, which, as you would assume, makes more sense because it would be useful to the users.

A third but rather quick point is that the time it takes to get those backlinks also matters, 500 backlinks in 10 days is not as good as 500 links in 2 months. This is because a slow increase in backlinks shows a slow growth I popularity and seems more realistic. However, it is unlikely you will be penalized for getting quick backlinks as that would mean that a big business diversifying to the internet (which of course would get many backlinks quickly) would be instantly shot down.

Finally the authority ranking of a site matters, getting a link back from a new site is not as powerful as getting a link back from a well known, well linked, high pr website. An example of an authority website are such things as dig and stumbleupon, these get crawled regularly, unfortunately because of the link system and no follow attributes on some social bookmarking sites there is only the quick crawling to gain and traffic rather than seo and serp increases, however some social bookmarking sites still employ do follow.