Internet links pointing to a web page. Often used to measure "link popularity".

Search engines often use the number of back links that a website has as one of the factors for determining that website's search engine ranking. For example, Google's Page Rank algorithm uses back l inks to help determine a site's rank (the Google Toolbar can be used to view the Page Rank of a web page). Therefore, websites often employ various techniques (called search engine optimization) to increase the number of back links pointing to their website

Backlinks enable you to keep track of other pages on the web that link to your posts. For instance, suppose Alice writes a blog entry that Bob finds interesting. Bob then goes to his own blog and writes a post of his own about it, linking back to Alice's original post. Now Alice's post will automatically show that Bob has linked to it, and it will provide a short snippet of his text and a link to his post. What it all works out to is a way of expanding the comment feature such that related discussions on other sites can be included along with the regular comments on a post.

Our default templates are already set up with the necessary code for backlinks. However, if you have a custom template, or one of our templates from before this feature was launched, you will need to add the code yourself.

Backlink tags:
There are two sections of template code that relate to backlinks. One section simply creates the links that readers see next to your posts. The other section displays the backlinks themselves. We'll look at these two parts separately. Backlink indicator: The following piece of code will print a link reading "Links to this post." It should be placed between the
Blogger and Blogger tags that display your posts, and you'll probably want it in the byline, near the author's name and the comments links. BlogItemBacklinksEnabled Links to this post BlogItemBacklinksEnabled First, notice the
BlogItemBacklinksEnabled
tags that surround the others. This is so the rest of the code will only be displayed on posts for which backlinks are enabled. Then, the link tag points to the post page where the backlinks will be listed in detail. You can put whatever text you like in place of "links to this post."