When I started out in the world of internet marketing what surprised me most was the need to learn a whole new language. For instance, can you explain to me in 10 words or less what backlinks are? No? Well you don’t need to. I finally found out that backlinks are incoming links. The more links you have coming into your site the more routes you have for web browsers to travel to get to your site.

This sounds like a good thing, doesn’t it? Well some links are better than other. Think of the links like a road map leading to a town (your site). Some of the roads are highways, some are byways, some are back roads, and some are just muddy trails.  The better the link (road) someone finds to your site (town), the more apt they are to follow it and also, the more they will think of your town even before they get there because of the quality of the road. Google is also more impressed with sites that have high quality backlinks.

There are two types of backlinks — one way backlinks and and two-way (or reciprocal) backlinks. Sometimes people think that the reciprocal backlinks are better, but they are wrong. Once upon a time reciprocal links were state of the art. It is easy – you scratch my back and I scratch yours. What happened is that people got into the business of link farming. Link farms traded links with just about anyone. Sure you both got links out of it but wily Google caught on to this business and starting ranking sites with a lot of two-way links a little lower because some of the links were nothing more than fluff.

One-way links – links from sites that link to you but you don’t link back – carry a lot more weight because Google knows that you a site links to you without any kind of trade in return, then they must really respect your site.

A popular way of getting backlinks from great sites was joining forums and commenting on blogs but what is happening there is that a lot of these sites have a nofollow tag. This means that search engine spiders get the message not to follow links on that forum or blog. So getting a backlink from a site with no follow instructions will do you no good.

The point is when you are working on building your backlinks, avoid two-way links and don’t waste a lot of time commenting in forums and blogs just for the sake of backlinks. It’s a waste of your time.