what exactly is a backlink?

[hyacinthgirl]

i tried using the search feature this time, but i still couldn't figure it out. can someone explain some things to me, please?

- what is a backlink? how do i "get" them?
- when i looked up "link popularity" on a pagerank page, i got these results:
Google 13
MSN 610
Yahoo 1,504
- what do backlinks do for my site, anyhow?

why such a disparity? what is wrong that google hates me so much?

i'm trying to figure out why i'm dropping in the search engines each day and why my keywords aren't "working" anymore. i think i don't understand a lot of this stuff. i haven't changed much, if anything, since taking over the site. do i need to be messing with these things daily to keep it up? jfdjfkjsafjdakdkjfa;sk i'm so confused but if i keep seeing my organic traffic decline i'm going to cry (because i'm such a girl, dammit).

[themike537]

Backlinks are links that point to your site. You can get them by exchanging links with other site, providing free articles to other sites with your links embedded in them, submit to directories, etc

Google often only counts "quality" links, ie links that have decent pagerank with few outgoing links on the pages. Yahoo and MSN often count any links they can find.

We'd need a lot more info to try to figure out why you're losing traffic. I'm by no means an expert, but what changes have you made to the site so far?