In a recent Q&A stream from his home in Switzerland, Senior Google Webmaster Trends Analyst John Mueller offered some interesting insights regarding the shelf-life for inbound links.
For small business SEO, just a few quality inbound links can make a huge difference, so these insights can prove particularly helpful. Learn more about inbound links and whether they lose value over time below.
What are inbound links?
Sometimes referred to as backlinks, inbound links are links from other websites that link to your website. Inbound links refer to both the link and the anchor text it’s fixed to. Additionally, it must be clickable for Google to consider it an inbound link.
Inbound links are one of the most Photo Editing Services significant pillars of good SEO. When another site links to yours, they pass what’s known as link equity on to your site. Link equity is one of the most important factors that Google considers when determining the authoritativeness of your site.
How does Google do this? When Google’s bots index a site, they follow every link on the page (and every link on those pages, and every link on those pages…), in part to ensure that each page links to further relevant pages. Most of the links these Google bots follow are internal links—links to other pages on the same site—but if they find an external link to your site, they interpret this to mean the page owner considers the content on your site helpful to their readers.