The backlink has long been thought of as being a critical element of determining prominence relating to search engine results pages (SERPs). A backlink ends up serving as a sort of endorsement for a website, as multiple backlinks to a website are usually viewed as an indication that a website is a trusted and reliable source for information.
In the end, more backlinks typically translate to higher SERP rankings. Many things have changed with backlinks in recent years, however.
For example, Google now places less of an emphasis on the quantity of backlinks and more on the quality of the backlinks. The changes to search engine algorithms can be frustrating for many digital marketing agents, but backlinks still remain important even if they are not the automatic key to success that they seemingly once were.
History of Backlinks
For as long as search engine optimization (SEO) has existed, backlinks have been prone to abuse by bad actors, and many of these actions directly contributed to search engines modifying their algorithms. It was not uncommon for some companies to use unethical tactics such as outright buying links from third parties to try and increase their SERP rankings.
The spam backlink was basically a link to a website from a low-quality website. One way Google attacked this problem was through its Penguin algorithm update.
The practice of backlink spamming was more common years ago when multiple websites would attempt to link to one another in an attempt to try and bolster their backlink counts and improve their r