Other sites linking to yours are one way search engines evaluate your site to determine where it should be displayed in a search engine results page. The more incoming links a site has, the more important the search engines see it.
But it depends on the type of links too – simply having a bunch of links pointing to your site isn’t going to pass muster.
It’s possible to go out and pay lots of money and do other nefarious things to get links to your site. Search engines like Google and Bing can see this, as they can differentiate between sites that have natural links to it versus ones that have artificial links.
So what’s the difference between the two?
First, the anchor-text, or the keywords that contain a link, is very diverse with natural links. One link to a site may contain “search engine optimization firm” and another may be “online marketing experts” for example. Artificial links though will have more uniform anchor-text…all of the links pointing to a site will only have one or two terms for its anchor-text.
This is one red flag to the search engines that you have an artificial link structure which in turn, causes your site to lose the rankings battle.
Another difference between natural and artificial links is the rate at which links appear. Sites with a natural link structure will see consistent increases in their link count while sites with an artificial link structure will see sudden and dramatic increases then a lull in activity.
Sites designed around a natural link structure do not have reciprocal links. Meaning, the site linking to them did it voluntarily and does not expect a link back in return. Almost all links in an artificial environment are reciprocal.
And finally, natural links point to resources that can be of further use to the reader. Artificial links mainly point to link farms and other places that serve no purpose in making the site more useful for its visitors.
Remember these differences when thinking about your site’s link structure. You should strive to create the most natural looking link structure as possible. From a search engine’s point of view, the best links are those that are unrequested…search engines reward those pages and sites that get voluntarily links for great content.