Why do I need backlinks

Backlinks are incoming links to a web page either from a page that's part of the same site or an external page on someone else's web site. Backlinks are also known as incoming links, inbound links, inlinks, and inward links.

Backlinks provide two benefits to a web page [site]. First, a backlink brings in visitors to your page. Second, a backlink provides pagerank [PR] to the page being linked to.

A page, that has a pagerank, will pass a portion of that pagerank to all the other pages it links to. A page with a page rank of 5 will pass 'x' amount PR to each page it points to. The more pages it points to the less pagerank is passed to each page. So the page that points to you passes you some amount of pagerank.

Server Analytics refer to backlinks as Traffic Sources, or Referring Sites. The server stats indicate that over the last month there have been 14,167 visits from 1,402 sources [backlink] to interfacebus.com. These are sites that link to me on their own, I stopped looking for referral sites years ago.

Last night I updated the search bar on 20 pages and in the process found a few bad links. I also added the tag rel="nofollow" to a few listings to preserve some of my own page rank. You do not pass page rank when you use the 'nofollow' tag.

I updated the sitemap again today reducing the number of redundant links. Remember that site map does not reside on "my" site, so they are all backlinks.

I added a new page to the site yesterday and made a comment in my what's new blog, providing a link to the new page [backlink].

I was in the newsgroups today, posted a reply to some ones comment. I left this blog address as my sig ~ that's a backlink.

Anyone see a pattern here?