Backlinks are a necessary part of promoting and optimizing a website. This is just another way of saying a different site has a link that directs to your site. They are considered part of a search engine optimization procedure necessary to establish an authority site in the eyes of a search engine.

Most search engines take into account the quality of your backlinks for their ranking algorithm. What makes a link have quality? Unfortunately, Google doesn’t tell us exactly what their criteria for good links are and they also won’t show us all the links they count.

However, you can look at sites that Google has given high marks to and attempt to reverse engineer those results. Even more importantly to you is to reverse engineer your competitor’s site.

Download the Google Toolbar, install it and restart your browser.

You’ll now see a bar with Page Rank written over it. If you happen to be on Google or Yahoo’s homepage, the bar will be completely green. Hovering over the green bar will show you their page rank is 10.  Apple’s page rank is 9.

Page Rank, also known as PR, is unique to Google. The PR ranges from 0 to 10. Normally, when an Average User is surfing, they never see the PR and have never even heard the term.  To web marketers, PR is something to be keenly aware of.

Now since we want to see the backlinks of a site, here’s how to use the toolbar to do that. Click on the Google icon on the far left side and choose ‘Options’. Click on the ‘More’ tab and check the box next to ‘Page Info Menu’. Click on ‘ok’.

On the toolbar, you’ll now see an icon of a blue circle with the letter ‘i’ in it. Click that and you’ll get an option to see backlinks which Google calls "Backward Links".  Choosing that option will send you to a page that looks like a normal search results page except that it’s listing all the web pages that link to the page you were on when you started the search.

Keep in mind that Google will not show every page that links to the site. They have their own secret recipe (algorithm) to determine what links will count. It’s much more difficult to get Google backlinks than it is to get them from other popular ones like Yahoo and MSN.

Google doesn’t update their backlinks listing in real time. If you’ve been working on getting more links to your site and don’t see them in the backlink list immediately, relax. If they are good quality links, Google will count them in their next page rank update.

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