Google uses many different signals to determine the position of a web page in the search results. The links from other websites that point to your website are still one of the most important signals that influence the rankings of your site.

If another website links to your site, this is a signal that the other website trusts your website. The more other websites link to your site, the more people trust your site. Many links from other websites are a signal that your website is trustworthy.

You can check the links that point to your website with the free link analysis tool OpenLinkProfiler.org. Just enter the URL of your website (or any website) to see the links that point to that site.

Although it is important that as many websites as possible link to your site, it is even more important that these websites are high-quality websites. Links from high quality websites have a much higher influence on the rankings of your web pages than links from low quality sites.

When you check the links that point to your website with OpenLinkProfiler.org, you will also see the LIS (Link Influence Score) of the linking websites. The higher the LIS, the higher is the influence of links from these pages.

As a rule of thumb, the easier it is to get a link, the less influence has that link on the rankings of your website.

In the past, spammers created links with automated tools. These automatically created links can get your website in trouble. Although Google has started to ignore these links, Google might still penalize your website if the majority of links that point to your website are automatically created links. Paid links also can get your website penalized.

The Link Disinfection tool in OpenLinkProfiler.org helps you to identify links from other websites that can harm your website rankings.

A page on your website that has many links from other pages will get better rankings than a page on your website that has no links from other pages.

The 'Pages' page on OpenLinkProfiler.org will show you the pages of a website that have the most links:

When you enter the URL of a particular page in the search box, the results will be filtered for that page:

The anchor texts that are used to link to a website have a big influence on the keywords for which the website gets high rankings on search engines.

It's not advisable to use the same anchor text over and over. However, anchor texts that contain keywords that are related to the topic of a website will help a lot.

The page 'Anchor texts' shows you the anchor texts that are used to link to a website:

If the anchor texts do not contain keywords that are relevant to your website, contact the linking websites and ask them to adjust the links.

OpenLinkProfiler.org also enables you to check other factors. For example, you get the industries that link to a website, the link contexts, the top-linking domains, linking countries, the age of the links, etc.

A detailed overview of the links that point to your own website helps you to improve your search engine rankings by optimizing these links. By analyzing the links of your competitors, you can benefit from their work.

"On Twitter, Google’s John Mueller confirmed that your website should not have pages that deliver a 5xx status code. 5xx status codes indicate server errors. If your web pages deliver such a status code to search engines, search engines will think that your website is broken, even if the page can be displayed in your web browser."

"DuckDuckGo Founder and CEO Gabriel Weinberg testified Tuesday morning before the Senate Judiciary Committee on online privacy. The committee was holding a hearing on GDPR, CCPA and potential U.S. privacy legislation. [...]

He said that the company has 'been profitable using contextual advertising since 2014, and last year we earned substantially more than the $25 million revenue floor that subjects a company to CCPA.' Weinberg speculated that returning to contextual ads 'would allow companies to remain profitable, or even become more profitable – all without the unintended consequences of behavioral advertising.'"

"On Twitter, Google’s John Mueller replied to a post that implied that Google’s search quality raters have a direct impact on the rankings of a website on Google. [....]

Google’s search quality raters are people who assess the quality of Google’s search results manually. The data generated by Google’s quality raters is used to improves Google’s regular ranking algorithms."

Related: Bing's quality raters also cannot penalize websites.

"On Twitter, Google has announced a broad core algorithm update. The rollout of the update began on March, 12th. [...]

There’s no ‘fix’ for pages that may perform less well other than to remain focused on building great content. Over time, it may be that your content may rise relative to other pages."