Referrers and Backlinks in SEO
If you’re working on your search engine optimization (SEO), what do you need to know about referrers and backlinks.
A referrer is a website with one or more links to you on its homepage. Each of those links is a backlink, so you might have more backlinks than referrers (one referrer site with three backlinks, for example).
You want to understand where your site visits come from. They come from referrers. The referrer is the website a visitor was on that had a backlink to you. The visitor clicked the backlink and arrived at your door. Google Analytics shows this referrer data.
Those two definitions have a subtle difference. One says that referrer is anyone with a link, one says that a referrer is anyone with a link that someone clicked.
When reporting to its clients, an SEO services company may very well prefer to use the first definition; a referrer is a site with backlinks to your site. You see, even if no one ever clicks a particular link, its still important to you. In fact, making sure you have those links is a vital part of the work done by an SEO services firm.
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!
You might think it’s easy to find out how many referrers you have, but it’s not. Some people recommend using Google and typing link:www.myhomepage.com, but that doesn’t give you most of your referrers; it’s just a small percent. If you have access to Google Webmaster Tools, that’s a better gauge. Yahoo has better tools for looking up backlinks, and how you’re doing in Yahoo is a good measure of how you’re doing in Google. In Yahoo, type link:http://www.myhomepage.com and you’ll see referrer data. Yahoo lets you look at referrers only to the homepage, or to the whole site. You can also remove internal links from the results. Some SEO companies automatically give access to this data to their clients as part of their services.