Link building’s main purpose remains to increase the visibility of individual websites on various search engines—however, other SEO measures have since been established for this process as well (see following paragraph: link building as a ranking factor).
The efforts surrounding backlinks are referred to as link bait and are associated with link marketing. The main goal website operators seek to achieve here is to increase the popularity of a link or domain. The popularity of a link and domain of a website is evaluated based on the quantity and quality of its inbound links. In terms of quantity, each and every individual link (link popularity) and website (domain popularity) that refers to the analyzed website is evaluated. The quality of a given link, on the other hand, is determined by certain values of the linking website (e.g. the TrustRank, the Hilltop algorithm, etc.)
For evaluating individual links, and entire websites, search engines rely on web crawler programs (also referred to as search bots, robots, or spiders) that scan websites and evaluate them based on certain criteria. The power of a link is known as link juice or link power. To a certain extent, this link power can be transferred to other websites that they’re connected to. The concept is often compared to a river from which multiple distributaries flow: just as water originating from one stream makes its way into different channels, link juice flows from one website to all of the websites that are linked to the site and then evenly distributes the link power. Following this concept, the more websites that are linked, the weaker the link power transferred.
Given that the link juice of other sites can be used for one’s own web presence, it’s important to prioritize adding backlinks to pages earmarked to rise within search engine rankings. Ideally, inbound links should originate from websites that search engines consider to be of high quality. What’s more, this linking strategy isn’t just beneficial for search engine rankings; it also carries the potential of being able to immediately increase a website’s visitor numbers. Backlinks guide many users to websites for the first time, and if they’re then interested in the content they encounter, they may end up becoming regular visitors. The chances of gaining new users increase as soon as the linked websites attain a certain level of authority and trust, especially when their thematic topics are relevant to that of their backlinks.