What Qualifies as a Backlink?

SEO

When you run a website or have a webpage you are interested in having people see that site and the pages you've created.  As a business you not only want people to see your site but buy your products.

People who view your site are referred to as traffic in the world of internet marketing and SEO.  There are several aspects to SEO (Search Engine Optimization) but the biggest pieces are on-page content factors and backlinks.

1. On-Page content:
   Keyword density of your content.  That is, you want people to find your page when they run a search on Google, Yahoo or MSN.  If you keep your web pages very narrowly focused then the search engines will prefer your pages.
2. Backlinks:
   Backlinks can be from off-site pages (like a Hubpages article) or on-site pages (like another page on your site).  When you are getting your site up and running in the beginning your pages won't have any respect or authority with Google, Yahoo, or MSN.  As a result they will count but not very much.  The best backlinks from an already established website.

Types of Backlinks

Typically when discussing SEO only Google's algorithm is mentioned.  There are 2 reasons for this.  First, Google own the vast majority of the search traffic market.  Second, the Yahoo and MSN search algorithms usually follow the Google algorithm.  (If they don't today they will tomorrow.)

For Google there are 2 types of backlinks - ones that pass page rank and ones that do not.  Page rank is how Google measures the importance of any given web page.  The importance of any given page is largely determined by the number of backlinks pointing to that page.  However, after years of spammers posting links on every site they could Google provided sites with a way of controlling which links were legit and which were garbage.  There is an additional tag for the href tag in html named "rel".  If rel is set to "nofollow" then the backlink does not pass any page rank and does not increase the page rank of your page.

Backlinks without Page Rank...

Even when the rel="nofollow" is used and no page rank is passed the link can still be good.  These links can still generate traffic for your site but won't help in your search engine ranking (or page rank).

The most coveted backlinks are ones which do not include the rel="nofollow" tag.  Most sites today automatically put the nofolllow tag at the end of any links that you put on a site.  Most sites like Wikipedia and Wordpress will put the nofollow tag at the end of any outbound link by default.  So do most but not all forum sites.

Article marketing is currently the best way to generate those most coveted backlinks.  Hubpages, Ezine, and Squidoo are generally considered to be the best sites.  Wordpress.org is another good site for generating backlinks.  (Any content you create will create backlinks without the nofollow, and comments with links will have the nofollow.)

Many people become obsessed with page rank.  Page rank, as I understand it, is the least important of factor in determining the search engine results for a given keyword.  Don't spend all of your time chasing page rank, it is just one piece of the puzzle.