Google Generation

Inbound links to a Web site, meaning other Web sites have a link to that Web site within them, also are important to SEO. They are important because they can indicate a page’s quality, popularity, or status on the Web, yet site owners have little control over which sites link to them. When links became part of the criteria used by crawlers to rank Web sites, some unscrupulous SEO marketers developed “link farms” to artificially increase rankings.

Today, links usually must be related to the content of the page; if a Web site’s inbound or outbound links do not match the keywords the site is listing, they will be of little value to the site’s ranking . Google and Yahoo! have tools that allow a user to see all of the Web sites that are linked to a particular site. To view links to a Web site in Google, open the Google search
engine and type “link:” before the Web address.

An example of this would be link:http://www.smumn.edu. To view links in Yahoo!, open the search engine and type in the Web address, adding “linkdomain” to the beginning and making sure to leave off “http://”, like this: linkdomain:www.smumn.edu .

It has a huge advantage with regards to site links:
The culture of the Web generally adores noncommercial content—something your website should be chock full of. And, let’s face it, giving you a link doesn’t cost a thing. Any webmaster or blogger who supports your cause—or at least has no major problem with it—will see adding a link [from their site to yours] as a cheap and easy way to help out. You will want to adjust your SEO plan.