When Google began it had to work out a way to classify the huge volumes of content on the internet.

The logical step was borrowed from the world of academic publishing and used links from other websites as votes of confidence in a site.

A page with more links pointing at it from around the web was therefore ranked higher for relevant searches.

It’s a true saying that marketers ruin everything – and early SEOs were quick to use every tactic to game this system with automated spam.

Google has consistently updated to punish such spammy tactics. Today backlinks remain one of the key pillars of SEO that can totally transform your business. But they need to be the right high quality backlinks.

For a start, power is very important. The most powerful links come from sites which themselves have lots of backlinks enhancing their authority in Google’s eyes.

But on an old site that’s quite normal. How much does Google really like a site and value its choices of who to link to?

94.3% of the internet has no traffic. Only a very small percent of websites get more than 1000 hits per month. We therefore only build links on these sites that Google clearly loves.