What is the deal with incoming links?

Do they really matter?

[budbiss]

I have two sites, one is database driven, it is our full-blown ecommerce site, then other is a sister site which simply tells users about another, seperate service we provide. The small site that tells users about the other service only has one incoming link, its from our ecommerce site. That small site actually ranks number 1-2 in Google for many of the terms used on it. Whats the deal here? Do incoming links really matter?

[budbiss]

By the way, another thing that is interesting to note about the "other service" site is that, unlike the ecommerce site, the keywords found on it are only listed once. It seems to defy the rules of SEO for some reason.

[centime]

does the ecomerce site have a lot of incoming links?

is your niche not very competitive?

For all the SE's incoming links are important for a variety of reasons, including

- SE spiders often find you site via links, more links more spiders, more indexing

- incoming links are generally regarded as a vote , in favour of your site, from the site linking in to you, hence links appear to be a big part of the ranking strategies of the SE's

- there is plenty more, ,,

[budbiss]

The ecommerce site only has about 5 incoming links. I'm really not sure how to gain any links besides buying them. I can afford to buy them, but should I? a) It seems a bit shady to buy links. Doesn't doing this go against the efforts of the SE bot which is trying to create an index of relevant pages? b) In any case, will it really make a difference?

[centime]

Well, every ones experience is different, but yes Links do matter, a lot.

Might I ask how many uniques you get per day over the 2 sites?

[budbiss]

As for the eCommerce site, AWStats reports that for the month of April we had 962 unique visitors. However, of that we received the following from PPC advertising:
Adwords: 508
MSN Adcenter: 65
Yahoo Search Marketing: 27

As for the other site, AWStats reports only 122 unique visitors.