Welcome to the Treehouse Community

Want to collaborate on code errors? Have bugs you need feedback on? Looking for an extra set of eyes on your latest project? Get support with fellow developers, designers, and programmers of all backgrounds and skill levels here with the Treehouse Community! While you're at it, check out some resources Treehouse students have shared here.

Looking to learn something new?

Treehouse offers a seven day free trial for new students. Get access to thousands of hours of content and join thousands of Treehouse students and alumni in the community today.

Start your free trial

Business

Dennis Castillo
Dennis Castillo
16,018 Points

SEO, Backlinks???

On Search Engine Optimization, What is the meaning of backlinks?

Thanks :)

3 Answers

In Short: Backlinks are links to your website from another website.

However, it's much more complicated than that. You want backlinks on sites with a high PageRank that are do-follow backlinks. Let's look at some examples:

No-Follow Backlinks: I update a wikipedia article with a link to my (relevant) website. Wikipedia, as one would imagine, has a very high PageRank. However, the links on wikipedia are no-follow links. This means that when Google crawls the page, it will not count the links as backlinks to your page. This is done to prevent people from spamming wikipedia and other sites with links as it won't help them rank on google. There are tools you can obtain for Chrome that will show whether or not a link is do-follow or no-follow.

Do-Follow Backlinks: I have a friend who runs a popular blog. He let's me do a guest post and I add a link to my site. Google will crawl his site, see my link, and know that my site is important because it's linked on this high PageRank site. This will improve my SEO and ideally other people will see this and do backlinking for me by blogging about my site or linking it from their sites.

Hope this helps. I'm still a bit of a SEO noob, but this is my interpretation after much research.

Dennis Castillo
Dennis Castillo
16,018 Points

Thanks very much at least I have an idea now muahahahaha!!!! Thanks....

Dan Gorgone
STAFF
Dan Gorgone
Treehouse Guest Teacher

And if it helps: Here's a video on the subject of Link Building, related to backlinks, from our recently-launched SEO course.

Jonathan Grieve
MOD
Jonathan Grieve
Treehouse Moderator 91,253 Points

Backlinks are the list of incoming links to your website which is an SEO factor. Quantity in backlinks isn't the aim but you want to build up a list of quality backlinks from websites that have a high Google PageRank,