Most Search Engine Optimizers understand the importance of the back links in order for a website to succeed. Most search engines take into account of the back links quality for their ranking algorithm. We will cover the top three search engines (Google, Yahoo and MSN) here and discuss how they treat back links from their point of view.

The most popular search engine, Google, places great emphasis on back links. In fact, relevant back links is all a website needs to achieve a high ranking in Google result page. Google, however, does not shows all the indexed back links when user queries with the link: operator. In addition, Google does not update their back link index as frequent as their search results.

Yahoo, on the other hand, chooses to display all the back links to the users. A search with the link: operator often reveals most of a page’s back links to screen. Although they display most of the back links, it does not mean that they value them as much as in Google. Unfortunately, back links are not as important as they are in Yahoo than in Google.