Editing Backlink (section)

{{Short description|Link from some other website (referrer) to that web resource (referent}}
{{pp-semi|small=yes}}
{{Internet Marketing}}

From the point of view of a given web resource ([[referent]]), a '''backlink''' is a regular hyperlink on another web resource (the [[referrer]]) that points to the referent.<ref name="ASIST">{{cite journal | last1= Björneborn |first1=Lennart |last2=Ingwersen |first2=Peter | year = 2004 | title = Toward a Basic Framework for Webometrics | journal = [[Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology]] | volume = 55 | issue = 14 | page = 1218 | url = http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.94.1691&rep=rep1&type=pdf | archive-url= https://web.archive.org/web/20140910140314/http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/asi.20077/abstract |archive-date=2014-09-10 | doi = 10.1002/asi.20077|citeseerx=10.1.1.94.1691 |access-date=2020-05-27}}</ref> A ''web resource'' may be (for example) a [[website]], [[web page]], or [[web directory]].<ref name="ASIST"/>

A backlink is a [[reference]] comparable to a [[citation]].<ref>{{cite book|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=eNv7_KxJBUcC&pg=PA132|title=Social Information Retrieval Systems: Emerging Technologies and Applications for Searching the Web Effectively: Emerging Technologies and Applications for Searching the Web Effectively|page=132|last1=Goh|first1=Dion|last2=Foo|first2=Schubert|publisher=Information Science Reference|year=2007|isbn=978-1-59904-543-6}}</ref> The quantity, quality, and relevance of backlinks for a [[web page]] are among the factors that search engines like [[Google]] evaluate in order to estimate how important the page is.<ref>{{cite web |url=https://www.google.com/competition/howgooglesearchworks.html |title=About Search|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20111104131332/https://www.google.com/competition/howgooglesearchworks.html |archive-date=2011-11-04 |access-date=2016-04-20}}</ref><ref name="Lingras_Akerkar">{{cite book |last1=Lingras |first1=Pawan |last2=Akerkar |first2=Rajendra |title=Building an Intelligent Web: Theory and Practice |chapter=Web Structure Mining § PageRank Algorithm |chapter-url=https://books.google.com/books?id=a_a5gsKxBOEC&pg=PA294 |date=10 March 2010 |publisher=Jones & Bartlett Publishers |isbn=978-1-4496-6322-3 |page=294}}</ref> [[PageRank]] calculates the score for each web page based on how all the web pages are connected among themselves, and is one of the variables that [[Google Search]] uses to determine how high a web page should go in [[Search engine results page|search results]].<ref>{{cite book |last=Olsen |first=Martin |editor1-last=Diaz |editor1-first=Josep |editor2-last=Calamoneri |editor2-first=Tiziana |title=Algorithms and Complexity: 7th International Conference, CIAC 2010, Rome, Italy, May 26–28, 2010, Proceedings |chapter-url=https://books.google.com/books?id=4RTexhx0efEC&pg=PA37 |chapter=Maximizing PageRank with New Backlinks |date=20 May 2010 |location=Berlin |publisher=Springer Science & Business Media |isbn=978-3-642-13072-4 |oclc=873382847 |page=37}}</ref> This [[weighting]] of backlinks is analogous to [[citation analysis]] of books, [[scholarly paper]]s, and [[academic journal]]s.<ref name="ASIST"/><ref name="Lingras_Akerkar"/> A Topical PageRank has been researched and implemented as well, which gives more weight to backlinks coming from the page of a same topic as a target page.<ref>{{Cite book|last1=Nie|first1=Lan|last2=Davison|first2=Brian D.|last3=Qi|first3=Xiaoguang|title=Proceedings of the 29th annual international ACM SIGIR conference on Research and development in information retrieval |chapter=Topical link analysis for web search |date=2006|series=SIGIR '06|location=New York, NY, US|publisher=ACM|pages=[https://archive.org/details/sigirseattle20060000inte/page/91 91–98]|doi=10.1145/1148170.1148189|isbn=978-1595933690|s2cid=2877831 |chapter-url-access=registration|chapter-url=https://archive.org/details/sigirseattle20060000inte/page/91}}</ref>

Some other words for ''backlink'' are '''incoming link''', '''inbound link''', '''inlink''', '''inward link''', and '''citation'''.<ref name="ASIST"/>