Referrers and Backlinks in SEO

by Karolinna Maxwell | 4th October 2009

by Karolinna Maxwell

What is referrer data in terms of search engine optimization services?

When examining your website, it is useful to know that a referrer is the website that is the source of a link, or perhaps several links, to your site. Every link on the referrer's homepage is called a backlink, which means that you might look up this data and discover more backlinks to your site than referrers. For instance, one referrer site might have five backlinks.

When you're talking about site visits, a referrer is the site on which someone clicked a link to get to you. So if you see the word referrer on your Google Analytics data, that means that a visitor reached your site directly from the referrer site.

Keep in mind that a technical dictionary defines "referrer" as anyone with a link to you, but Google Analytics defines is as someone with a link to you THAT SOMEONE CLICKED. Important difference!

An SEO (search engine optimization) company will probably want to report the first kind of referrer to its clients: Any site with a backlink should be counted in SEO reporting. This is because no one needs to click on a link in order for that link to have value. In fact, an excellent SEO company should work hard to make sure those referrers exist in adequate numbers.

Referrers and their backlinks help create authority for your website. The search engines interpret links to you as a way of saying that your site is worth reading on the subject matter. This helps your ranking. It's as if I wrote an article about (for example) paper, and used a footnote to the American Journal of Things Made of Paper. The footnote is giving the American Journal of Things Made of Paper authority, by saying it has value to me on the subject. In this way, backlinks can improve site authority, and help you rise to the top.

You might think it's easy to find out how many referrers you have, but it's not. Some people recommend using Google and typing link:www.myhomepage.com, but that doesn't give you most of your referrers; it's just a small percent. If you have access to Google Webmaster Tools, that's a better gauge. Yahoo has better tools for looking up backlinks, and how you're doing in Yahoo is a good measure of how you're doing in Google. In Yahoo, type link:http://www.myhomepage.com and you'll see referrer data. Yahoo lets you look at referrers only to the homepage, or to the whole site. You can also remove internal links from the results. Some SEO companies automatically give access to this data to their clients as part of their services.

About the Author:
Karolinna Maxwell is an long-standing Internet specialist working with the New Jersey-based SEO company ClickResponse.net. Click for a free SEO services website review, consultation, and quote.


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