The Historical Importance of Backlinks.

Posted Monday, May 22nd, 2006. Filed under Google, Internet Marketing Tips, Jim's Crazy Ideas, Link Building, SEO Research.

In March of 2005 Google applied for a patent called "Information Retrieval Based on Historical Data." Some of the points in that patent deal with links and time, including scoring documents based on the behavior of links over time, the freshness of links, and the age distribution of links pointing to a document.

When someone links to you, Google dates it and records the anchor text used. This data is saved, and Google analyzes it to help determine ranking factors, including the date someone first linked to you and the age of the document that links to you — a link from a page that's been up for years is likely much better than one from a brand new page.

You can't change your past. I believe the engines look at both your past history and where you're at now. This post was inspired by someone asking how long it would take to rank in the top 10 for a phrase, when his site had little backlink history with that phrase while competitors had years of it. The answer: probably longer than you might think.

On a personal note, We Build Pages will probably never be in the top few again for the phrase "internet marketing" because of some shady history — those big PR9's and PR8's bought back in 2002 that got the PR block in 2003, those crappy reciprocal links from 2002, that hidden text from 2001. We all have skeletons in our closet. Think about your link neighborhoods and link deals today, because the backlink history you write today might determine your rankings tomorrow.