In order to attain high rankings for your website, you need to get other websites to link to your website. Therefore, external links are one of the most important elements determining your website ranking. External links are links to websites other than your own. They are one of the most difficult metrics to manipulate, and therefore offer a clear picture of your website's popularity. External links are deemed to be one of the most effective means for search engines to determine the popularity of a particular web page. External links help boost the Ranking Power of your website.
Major search engines employ the following metrics when deciding the value of external links:
1. The linking page's popularity.
2. The relevance of the content between the linked pages.
3. The link's anchor text.
4. The quantity of links on the source page linking to the same location.
5. The number of domains that link to the target page.
6. The quantity of variations in anchor texts that link to the same page.
7. The domain ownership relationship between the source and target locations.
External links are important in determining your website's popularity and relevancy.
1. Popularity
It is difficult for search engines to measure website traffic accurately because traffic numbers are stored in private server logs. External links are a better metric to measure, both in terms of ease and stability. External links are visible to the public and easily accessed.
2. Relevancy
Search engines use external links to gain clues as to the relevancy of a website. Links use anchor text that is usually composed by people to be reflective of the content being linked to. The source and target pages and domains cited in a link are tremendously valuable for determining relevancy metrics. External links usually point to related content. This is very helpful in the establishment of Internet knowledge hubs, which search engines then use to confirm the value of a web document.
