Incoming link

From ArticleWorld

Incoming links serve as a gateway from one Web page to another. Usually, incoming links are found on Web sites that share relevant content. For instance, a Web site about dog breeding may contain a link to a Web site that offers additional information on breeding or a link to local veterinarians. Such links would be referred to as incoming links, because they are referring the user to another Web site or resource.

Importance

Incoming links have grown in popularity over the past few years, because it has begun to play a significant role in search engine optimization and page rankings. For example, in Google’s page rankings, the number of incoming links a Web site may have is taken into consideration when considering that page’s relevancy or ranking. Basically, the more incoming links a Web site has, the higher the page ranking. However, merely having incoming links does not necessarily guarantee high page rankings. Google will quickly assess the source from which the incoming links are from and determine that source’s relevancy to the Web page it is linking to. If the referring Web page is not relevant, than the incoming link is not counted. For instance, if a software development Web site linked to a dog breeding Web site, then that incoming link would not be counted as a valid or relevant link and would not be used to factor the page ranking.

Tracking

Web analysis often uses incoming links as an indicator of where a Web site’s traffic is coming from. This can be helpful for marketing and advertising purposes. For example, if a business finds that 85% of visitors reach their Web site via links on Yahoo! and only 15% reach the Web site via MSN, then the business may be more likely to purchase advertising space from Yahoo! than from MSN.