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Update: This post has been nominated for a SEMMY Award in the Link Building category. Full details about the Awards and the other nominees can be found here.
Sooner or later every SEO practicioner is going to have to try to explain the value and importance of having links to a website in a way that can be understood by a complete layman, whether that’s a client (who is more concerned about their business) or a friend or family member (who will probably end up regretting asking what you do in the first place).
There are all sorts of metaphors and analogies you can use to illustrate various aspects of link theory, from the buckets full of link juice used to explain PR flow and sculpting, through to examples where Links=Votes.
If you’ve explained yourself clearly enough (and your audience hasn’t dozed off in the meantime) you’ll then need to expand on the simple starting point to bring in additional concepts, like the extra boost provided by a link from a site with a high Page Rank value. In the case of the Links=Votes example, you could say that a link from an average site is like a regular vote, while a link from an authority site is the equivalent of a vote from a Super-delegate.
But the analogy I’ve found to be most useful when explaining the importance of inbound links is this…
Links are like the light from a torch beam
Try to imagine that each link pointing towards your site is like a beam of light from a torch. A link from a small PR1 site could be equated to the light from a handheld torch, while a link from a large authority site may be more like the beam of a spotlight or the Bat-Signal.
The more links pointing to your site and the more powerful they are, the brighter your site will shine, making it easier for Google to “see” what’s in your site when they’re looking to see if you’re relevant to a searcher’s query.
The brighter the lights shining on your site are, the brighter your own site will shine, so links out from your site will pass more value to their destinations and cause them to shine brighter as well.
Explaining the effect of nofollow links
Adding rel=nofollow to a link can be likened to placing an Infra Red filter over the torch beam. Although the link is still there for visitors to use to click through to your site, like the beam from your TV’s remote control the IR beam is invisible to the human eye (i.e. Googlebot) so it won’t cause the destination site to shine any brighter.
The colour of my (link) love
You can also imagine that Google applies coloured filters to certain link lights when they are evaluating links, so for example, if they regard a site as being particularly bad or spammy they might apply a red filter to all of its outbound links.
Get enough of these red light links pointing at your site and it will cause your site to glow red as well, alerting Google to take a closer look at your site, possibly resulting in a penalty.
Similarly, there may be other coloured filters in use to indicated different factors, such as high levels of “TrustRank” passed from .gov and .edu sites (green light) or indications of adult content (I’ve already used the stereotypical “Red Light Zone” in the example above, so let’s say blue, or maybe even Electric Blue 
)
As you can see, this is a very flexible way of explaining the value of gaining as many links to your website as possible and the various factors that Google may consider when evaluating those links. It’s certainly proven to be very effective for me when explaining link-theory to non-SEO types.
What other sorts of examples do you use? Do you think there’s a better way to explain this more clearly without getting bogged down in jargon? Let me know in the comments.
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Great analogy Ken. I’ve often used highway systems as analogies, complete with roadblocks and roads with varying numbers of lanes.
I like your light analogy better since it is more flexible.
Thanks Steven. I’ve used this analogy a few times recently when I’ve had to explain the value of getting links to people who don’t spend half their day reading SEO blogs and so far it’s been a roaring success.
Even my girlfriend (who thinks Google works “by magic” - hi sweetie) said she understood what I meant when I explained it to her.
That’s when I realised it would be worth writing a post about it to share the idea with everone else.
This it the best explanation I have found so far. Clear and to the point. You can’t ask for more then that. We all know how hard it can be to explain this to clients and I know that I will use this explanation in the future. Thanks!