I know the importance of backlinks. Everybody is looking for them, everyone wants to have a huge amount of backlinks. They can mean the difference from a site you will never be able to find and those top results. Of course when it comes to SEO backlinks aren't everything but if you want to get started and see some results i think this is the most important aspect !

But are backlinks that important ? so important that people spend hundreds of dollars on renting a few links ? spending thousands or tens of thousands of dollars on link campaigns ? Well YES !

Think of it like this every backlink is a vote to the other site. If you get votes from highly trusted sites well they will carry a bit of that information to your site right ? if you get backlinks from spam blogs and other discredited / banned sites well it could affect your image. I will try to explain how to build better links for your site by following a few simple rules so feel free to search through my blog.

As a different approach i will try to explain how rankings are affected by backlinks :

Let's say Site A and C are linking to site B, which on the other hand links to site D. We will pretend our sites have the following PR.

Site A : PR 4

Site B : PR 4

Site C : PR 3

Site D : unknown ( or zero, site just created)

Lets say k(X) is the total number of links pointing from the site X to the rest of the world. Let’s say site www.onion.com is pointing to 10 sites then k(www.onion.com) would be 10. In this case Page B would benefit from page A and C with about A/k(A) + C/k(C) PR rating. And site D with a B/k(B) rating.

Of course there are a lot more to this than just the number of links pointing in/out of each site but that’s the general idea.

It's a KISS explanation (Keep It Short & Sweet), I am now having less doubts in backlinks about the benefit and how it works. Thanks!