All major search engines use backlinks to determine the quality of a webpage. Google names this rank PageRank, Yahoo calls it WebRank. But they all use the referral links to determine the importance of the page. More important than backlinks is the amount of referring sites to your website, having a lot of backlinks from the same domain isn’t as valuable as having some backlinks from different domains.

This is why you should monitor not only the current amount of backlinks but also the amount of referring sites.

It doesn’t only matter how many inbound links you have but also whether they are actually known by the search engines. Both Google and Yahoo provide ways to know the amount of inbound links, but Google tricks you by showing you different information than what they really know about and use to determine your page rank.



SheerSEO software allows you to see the real amount of referrers your site has in Google and in Yahoo databases.