I know this is a dumb question but

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   Brie Hoffmanposted 14 years ago

   What are incoming links?
   
   thanks

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      thisisoliposted 14 years agoin reply to this

      incoming links (Backlinks) are links from other websites which link to your own website.

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   Lily Roseposted 14 years ago

   This is one of the first hubs that helped me understand what the heck backlinks were when i first started here:  http://hubpages.com/hub/Hubpages-backli … or-Dummies
   
   Hope this helps!

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      Brie Hoffmanposted 14 years agoin reply to this

      Thanks, this helps a lot.  However, what are the links that they "star" in the Hub Stats section.  What are those?

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         sunforgedposted 14 years agoin reply to this

         the links they star is a rudimentary scale, one incoming link doesnt necessarily equal 1 star. Personally, i think that particular metric has 0 utility.
         
         All of the built in hubmetrics are very basic tools.
         
         Use analytics for most measurements
         
         use a firefox plug in for page rank / results ranking
         
         ( seo quake , page rank checker ,  seo for firefox are some good options)
         
         use yahoo site explorer or the site command in google to check on backlinks
         
         https://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/
         
         google command = (link:www.yourhuburl.com)

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            shazwellynposted 14 years agoin reply to this

            Absolutely!  Hubpages stats are nothing compared to google anaylitics - very comprehensive!  I second that emotion!!!

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   MikeNVposted 14 years ago

   It's not a dumb question at all.
   
   More important is the purpose of the links.
   
   Links serve two purposes:
   
   1.  To get visitors directly from the link to visit your articles.
   2.  To attract search engine bots attention so they will index and rank you based on the content of your sites as described in the link "anchor text".  Anchor text is the keywords that you or someone else uses in the link to describe your content.
   
   For example:  If you wrote a hub about San Diego Beaches
   
   Your anchor text might be:  San Diego Beach Resorts
   
   Which would help the search engines understand more about your site/article.
   
   If you had a link that said: Click here for more
   
   It doesn't tell the search engines much about your article/site.
   
   "links" are used by search engines as a kind of "vote" for the content of your site.
   
   If you are not trying to take money and do not care if 1 person or 1,000 read your articles from external sites and only care about the Hub Community visitors... then they don't matter much at all.

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      Brie Hoffmanposted 14 years agoin reply to this

      But I do care, so if you want to increase your links what would you do?

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         Kenrick Chatmanposted 14 years agoin reply to this

         -Submit articles with anchor links to article directories including sites like Suite101 and Examiner.com
         
         -Have articles submitted to relevant blogs with high page rank
         
         -Submit press releases with anchor links
         
         -Use social bookmarking
         
         and so on...
         
         Do this yourself or outsource it to SEO experts.

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