Forum Moderators: martinibuster
lets say, i search for a keyword 'guitar' on google. then, i click the number 1 site to check how many backward links the site has, and it says 100 backward links.
my question is does it mean that there are 100 other sites that has linked to this site using the anchor text 'guitar' only? or did they link to the site with other variations of 'guitar' (i.e. electric guitar, classical guitar, etc) as well?
By 'backward link' I suppose you mean 'backlinks'.
A backlink is simply an incoming link, that is a link from some outside site.
Just clicking on standard search results will not indicate which or how many backlinks a page has.
Generally, and with exceptions, sites with more backlinks will rank higher in that list. -Larry
my question is does it mean that there are 100 other sites that has linked to this site using the anchor text 'guitar' only? or did they link to the site with other variations of 'guitar' (i.e. electric guitar, classical guitar, etc) as well?
You'd have to check each of the 100 links to see how many use the word "guitar." If you find a page for a very competitive, single-word search term, you can assume that some of backlinks contain that word, but it's very likely that not all of them do. It may be that not even most of them do.
But yes... if you're trying to rank a page for the single word "guitar," linking to it with various phrases containing the word (eg, "electric guitar," "classical guitar," etc) is a good strategy.
While inbound link anchor text is an important part of the Google algo, keep in mind that it's not the only factor.
You will, incidentally, get a much fuller picture of the number of backlinks a page has by checking the links to the url on Yahoo and on MSN. Google gives only a sampling of the backlinks to a page.
