In the beginning, Google use to rank pages by the number of inbound links a site had. The reason being, the more inbound links, the more important the page must be. Website owners caught on and began link exchanges, hidden links and other nefarious tactics to boost their search engine rankings. Google has since changed how it ranks pages, so such tactics no longer work. The search engine now looks at the quality of links (authoritative) as a way of measuring a website’s authority.