I have read a few articles which imply backlinks to be a “vote” from one site acknowledging the presence of the other site, somewhat like the internal navigational structure of a site, only this time the link goes out.

Some have also referred to them as “Gold Coins” which act like rungs of a ladder that take you to higher placement. Though they are correct, in my opinion, these implications may be a little inadequate.

What if we were to think of backlinks as the basis of the true “Net”? This WWW that we call the “Net” was named so for a reason. Visually, we can truly imagine it to be one giant network with signals passing from one site to the other, with search engines like Google behaving like the gatherer of these signals to recognize the importance of a particular website. The more signals coming from websites to a particular website just logically implies that the targeted site is an important one. High page ranking backlinks naturally give off more powerful signals than smaller websites, but these smaller ones should not to be taken lightly.

Backlinks thus create this flow and projection of signals coming back to your website. All this fuss just makes the search engines want to rank you higher. After all, in the “Net”, you have to join in on the network: you cannot survive if you are a lonely island in this vast ocean.