'Watchmen' delivers great scenes

Action fantasy. Starring Malin Akerman, Billy Crudup, Jackie Earle Haley, Jeffrey Dean Morgan and Patrick Wilson. Directed by Zack Snyder.

Director Zack Snyder is beginning to look like the best thing to happen to the action movie in this decade. His previous film, "300," took the battle of Thermopylae and re-created it, combining stylized visuals with a feeling for history, culture and character. His new picture, "Watchmen," follows in the same vein, but goes deeper, achieving a psychological sophistication that "The Dark Knight" aimed for but didn't quite reach.

Other directors shake the camera to instill excitement. Snyder meticulously choreographs action scenes and thrills audiences with his inventiveness. Other directors go in for brutal realism. Snyder goes in for brutal surrealism, adding little visual grace notes that comment on the action and allow for audience distance. These touches, some of them genuinely odd but strangely right, show an unconscious engagement with the material, the work of a director not going through the motions but pulling from all sides of his brain.

He had a strong advantage going into "Watchmen," an audacious adaptation of the graphic novel of the same name. In their screenplay, writers David Hayter and Alex Tse don't do the usual thing of pounding the novel into something simple and linear. Instead they give us a story with lots of digressions and spin-off narratives. In one scene, at a funeral, the movie's forward motion completely stops for a series of flashbacks in which various people recall their contacts with the deceased. These scenes and others like them explore character - and with no apology coming in the form of an action orgy minutes later.

One could say that the filmmakers' strategy in "Watchmen" is to try to hold the audience's attention, not with a great story (the story is just OK), but with great scenes, one after the next. That's the ultimate risk in any narrative art: It means that the contract for an audience's engagement is up for renewal at the end of every sequence. Yet Snyder and company keep closing the deal. They keep the ball in the air for an epic 163 minutes, by attending to the drama within scenes and by nurturing the film's pervasive mood - despair and nihilism.

That mood descends during the opening credits. Through a mix of archival and manufactured footage, we get the back-story of "Watchmen" through flashes - an alternate history in which masked heroes have been part of the urban landscape for decades. The effect of this credit sequence can't be overstated: It presents, in fictionalized form, the mid to late 20th century as an endless slog of wars, assassinations and mass deceptions. Within minutes, the viewer has been infused with a sense of life on earth as chaotic and hopeless.

It's 1985. Richard Nixon is still president, the Soviets are threatening nuclear war, and a serial killer is threatening two generations of masked heroes, who were once important figures on the American scene. Now disbanded and back in private life, the various heroes, to different degrees, try to discover who is after them. Along the way, they uncover more serious plots and threats to civilization.

Unlike the case of "The Dark Knight," there are no performances here that we'll be talking about at Oscar time, but the ensemble is excellent, with Patrick Wilson as a Batman-like figure, who's shy except in his bat suit; Malin Akerman, as the woman torn between him and her increasingly remote lover - a shape-shifting, radiation altered superman (Billy Crudup); and Jackie Earle Haley as Rorschach, the gruffest, meanest little guy anywhere.

Hard-bitten, weary and contained, the performances reinforce the somber mood. Action scenes, when they happen, are bold and striking, but they're kept to a minimum. As the story isn't the movie's strong suit, it's no surprise that the climax is mild by action movie standards - just an intelligent resolution, then the credits.

The appeal of "Watchmen" is really about something else - the sight of a blimp passing by the twin towers, as seen from an office window. It's about the uneasiness we feel when we see those towers resurrected in an alternate universe. Part conscious and part unconscious, "Watchmen" tells us of a world without hope and then makes us wonder if we're already living in it.

-- Advisory: This movie contains simulated sex, nudity, strong language and graphic violence.

Main link: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2009/03/06/MV5M16993S.DTL

AOL hires Google's Tim Armstrong as new boss

AOL has hired Tim Armstrong, Google's president of the Americas operations, as its new chief executive.

Armstrong is widely credited with driving Google's advertising revenue model, and AOL is hoping that he can help the struggling internet services company switch to being fully supported by advertising.

Advertisement

"Tim is the right executive to move AOL into the next phase of its evolution, " said AOL Time Warner president Jeff Bewkes.

"At Google, Armstrong helped build one of the most successful media teams in the history of the internet, helping to make Google the most popular online search advertising platform in the world for direct and brand marketers. He is an advertising pioneer with a stellar reputation and proven track record."

Current AOL chief executive Randy Falco and chief operating officer Ron Grant will leave the company as soon as the handover can be completed.

"Randy led AOL in its transition from a subscription business to an audience business," said Bewkes.

"Under Randy and Ron, AOL's programming sites exhibited year-over-year growth in unique visitors for 23 consecutive months, with many of its sites now in the top five of their categories."

Main link: http://www.vnunet.com/vnunet/news/2238436/aol-hires-google-exec-boss

The Age of Hacking For Political Advantage

David Kernell, the Tennessee college student who allegedly broke into Governor Sarah Palin's Yahoo! mail account has pleaded not guilty to three new felony charges. Kernell now faces charges of intentional access without authorization; fraud; unlawful electronic transmission of material outside the state; and attempts to conceal records to impede an FBI investigation. If he is found guilty on all counts, Kernell could face up to 20 years in prison and a fine of up to US $250,000. http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/03/09/palin_hacker_recharged/ http://www.vnunet.com/vnunet/news/2238234/student-pleads-guilty-sarah

[Editor's Note (Schultz): I hate to think of someone going to prison for 20 years as the result of a cyberprank, yet at the same time the events surrounding this story point directly to the risks individuals incur when they engage in unauthorized computing activity.

(Skoudis): Given this story and the one about Senator Coleman below, both associated with politics, we seem to have entered the age of hacking for political advantage by embarrassing an adversary or drying up their contributions through a breach. You know, ironically, I fully accept the militarization of cyber space, but somehow the politicization of the hack just doesn't sit well with me. If this continues and grows, having our politics distorted by breaches would be a scary thing.]

"Tennessee college student," Russian-style:

GOVERNMENT SYSTEMS AND HOMELAND SECURITY

--Russian Youth Group Member Boasts of Role in 2007 Estonian DDoS Attacks (March 11 & 12, 2009)

A member of a Kremlin-backed youth group called Nashe has said that he was an active participant in the May 2007 distributed denial-of-service (DDOS) attacks on computer networks in Estonia. Konstantin Goloskokov defended the attacks as "cyber defense;" the attacks were launched in retaliation for a decision made in Estonia to move a memorial statue for the Red Army. Goloskokov said his group acted independently and did not launch the attacks on orders from the government.

ISC: http://isc.sans.org/diary.html?storyid=5974

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/03/11/russian_admits_estonian_ddos/

http://www.h-online.com/security/Russian-youth-movement-claims-to-have-carried-out-cyber-attacks-on-Estonia--/news/112828

*Hack the Senator, and while you're at him, hack every democratic activist who exercised their civil rights by backing him:

--Wikileaks eMails Sen. Coleman Campaign Donors About Data Leak (March 11 & 12, 2009)

Wikileaks.org has posted information it says was leaked from the campaign web site of Minnesota Republican Norm Coleman, a candidate for the US Senate. The data include information belonging to about 51,000 Coleman campaign donors and supporters; 4,721 of those also had several digits of their credit card numbers exposed. Wikileaks said it published the information to substantiate claims that the website had suffered a data leak earlier this year. Legal counsel for Coleman maintains that the data were stolen, and that the campaign will "fully pursue all legal options available." Wikileaks has emailed all the donors whose information is in the files to let them know about the breach.

http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&articleId=9129460&intsrc=hm_list

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/03/12/colman_database_leaked/

http://minnesotaindependent.com/28711/breaking-colemans-unsecured-donorbase-to-be-revealed-on-wikileaks

http://government.zdnet.com/?p=4456

http://www.gantdaily.com/news/35/ARTICLE/45996/2009-03-11.html

http://blogs.citypages.com/blotter/2009/03/coleman_campaig.php

Brain Scanners Know Where You've Been

The brain's center of memory and navigation, once considered too disorganized to decode, may soon be unlocked. Using a brain scanner, researchers were able to determine the location of people standing in a virtual room from the activity in their brains.

"We could read their spatial memories, so to speak," said study co-author Eleanor Maguire, a University College, London, cognitive neuroscientist. "There must be a structure to how this is coded in the neurons. Otherwise we couldn't have predicted this."

Maguire's team focused on the hippocampus, a region of the forebrain responsible for processing spatial relationships and short-term memories. As people move, hippocampal activation helps them know where they are. In Alzheimer's patients, disorientation and memory loss go hand in hand.

But animal studies haven't been able to link specific hippocampal activities with memories, and rat studies suggested that spatial memories were actually stored randomly. There seemed to be no pattern, at least not a pattern that scientists could decipher and apply.

Maguire's study, published Thursday in Current Biology, challenges that notion. And though it's far too soon to pull memories directly from a brain, the findings suggest future avenues of research on Alzheimer's and other forms of dementia.

"How these millions of hippocampal neurons work is a fundamental question in neuroscience," said Maguire. "We still don't know how the hippocampal neural code is organized to support memory and activation."

The researchers used an fMRI machine to measure hippocampal blood flow in four subjects who navigated a room in virtual reality. They focused on groups of neurons identified by Maguire in an earlier study of London taxi drivers, whose hippocampi were hyperdeveloped by years of mental navigation through the city's mazelike streets.

After analyzing activation patterns and correlating them with a record of test subjects' movements, Maguire's team found that patterns could actually be used to predict location.

The results "are an intriguing first step toward using fMRI to read out information about visuo-spatial scenes," said Arne Ekstrom, a University of California at Los Angeles cognitive neuroscientist who was not involved in the study.

Ekstrom cautioned that the findings, relying on a bird's-eye fMRI view of just one part of the hippocampus, don't explain what's happening in individual neurons or across the entire structure.

Further studies will incorporate more test subjects than the four men included in this study, and involve other types of memory than spatial.

Though the findings fit with earlier demonstrations of visual memory's reconstruction from visual cortex activation patterns, study co-author Demis Hassabis, a London-based artificial intelligence researcher, cautioned that full-blown mind reading is still decades away.

More relevant, said Hassabis and Maguire, are potential insights into how memory deteriorates.

"We're learning more and more about how memory is laid down," said Maguire. "We can begin to understand how pathological processes erode memories, and think about how we might help patients in a rehabilitation context, to make the most of what memories they have left."

Citation: "Decoding neuronal ensembles in the human hippocampus." By Demis Hassabis, Carlton Chu, Geraint Rees, Nikolaus Weiskopf, Peter D. Molyneux, Eleanor A. Maguire. Current Biology, Vol. 19, Issue 6, March 12, 2009.

Main Link: http://blog.wired.com/wiredscience/2009/03/brainspace.html

New Army Weapon Aims to Fry Gadgets, People

Electronics-frying "e-bombs" have been discussed for decades — but rarely, if ever, deployed. Knocking out computers and communications gear with electromagnetic radiation is nice, but commanders prefer the proven method: blowing stuff up.

Now the U.S. Army is developing technology to do both at the same time. Hybrid munitions would give warheads the added punch of an e-bomb that can "destroy and disable electronic systems and their operators" all in one blast. The key is a magnet that blows up and spontaneously demagnetizes, releasing energy as a pulse of power. Oh, and antennas made of fire. My story in the current Defense Technology International explains.

Previous e-bomb designs were based on explosively driven magnetic flux compression generators. They used a series of tightly wound, current-carrying metal coils that are rapidly compressed by an explosion. The new technology is much more compact. It's based on research showing that some magnets will spontaneously demagnetize when hit by a powerful enough shock wave, releasing a pulse of energy, in the process. The technical term is "pressure-induced magnetic phase transition."

Having proved the principle by blowing up neodymium magnets (like the ones in your headphones) the Army's Aviation and Missile Research Development and Engineering Center (Amrdec) have moved on to lead zirconate titanate magnets. The current state of the art is described as a completely explosive ultracompact high-voltage nanosecond pulse-generating system, occupying about one-fifth of a cubic inch.

There are engineering challenges at the other end. For this new weapon to work, you need an antenna that can fit inside a warhead, but is big enough to do the job. The problem is, the size is dictated by the properties of the electromagnetic pulse to be generated. You could used some sort of folding antenna, perhaps. The Army is going one step further and using an antenna made out of fire. To be more exact, Allen Stults of Amrdec is using the jet of ionized plasma produced by the explosion as an antenna.

It has been known for centuries that flames will conduct electricity; there are a few neat applications, like flame speakers. This makes it possible to use a length of ionized gas rather than a piece of metal as an antenna. By tinkering with the chemical mixture in shaped charge warheads, Stults is creating a "plasma antenna" that will direct an electromagnetic pulse at the target. Like a lightsaber blade, the plasma antenna is a glowing tube that appears from nowhere — and it should be quite deadly to electronics.

The multifunction warhead technology is being applied to several types of weapon, including TOW missiles, 70mm helicopter rockets and the bomblets dispensed by MLRS artillery. The effects of e-bombs are notoriously unpredictable. A lot depends on the exact type of electronic component and its orientation compared to the e-bomb. The new munitions will have two crucial advantages over previous e-bombs: they are small, and should not cause electronic "friendly fire" casualties hundreds of meters away. And because they still have the same blast, fragmentation and armor-piercing properties as they did, commanders can be confident that they're not wasting space carrying rounds that might have no effect.

A couple of weeks ago Col. Laurie Buckhout of the Army's new Electronic Warfare Division, mentioned at a blogger's roundtable that technology for grenade-sized e-bombs existed. "But I've never had my hands on one," he added. There could be a lot of tactical applications for this sort of weapon. However, it's worth noting that if the technology spreads, U.S. forces are likely to be among the most vulnerable due to the heavy dependence on electronic devices.

Main link: http://blog.wired.com/defense/2009/03/army-turns-bomb.html

Is Wowowee a scam?

"Laging sinasabi ni Willie [Revillame] na [ang Wowowee], programa ng walang pag-asa. Kaya asang-asa talaga ako na 'yong bahay na mapapanalunan ko, [tulad ng] bahay na nakikita namin sa TV at saka may laman," lamented Nena Santos, winner of Wowowee's "Bigtime Pera o Bayong"on July 7, 2008.

PEP (Philippine Entertainment Portal) got an exclusive interview with Santos, who resides on Banlat Road, Tandang Sora, Quezon City, with regard to her complaint about the house and lot that she supposedly won in that segment of the noontime show.

As the second-prize winner, Santos said, she's supposed to get a house and lot from the real estate developer Globe Asiatique. The first prize winner won a house and lot, a car, and P1 million cash; while the third prize winner got P1 million. After seven months, however, Santos claims she still has not received her prize.

Santos said that she's been going to Wowowee every month to follow up her prize. But on her every visit, a certain Wowowee staff named Abby would only tell her: "'Antay-antay lang po tayo, tingnan na lang natin,' ganun lagi ang sinasabi."

Until her last follow up early this February, another staff told her to follow up the house and lot herself at the Globe Asiatique office in Ortigas. She told PEP in disappointment, "Parang nainis pa sa akin na, 'Sige na nga, nanay, pumunta na lang kayo sa Wowowee bukas. Hanapin ninyo si Ellen, bibigyan kayo ng certification at kayo na lang ang makiusap sa Globe Asiatique.'"

"HINDI BRAND NEW." The 56-year-old Santos said that after receiving the certification, she thought everything would be smooth and easy in getting her "dream house," which is located at Santa Barbara Villas II in San Mateo, Rizal.

To her dismay, she still could not move into the house after waiting for seven months.

"Pagdating namin doon [sa San Mateo], hinanap namin si Engineer Lalaine. Sabi niyang ganun, may laman pa raw 'yong bahay dahil na-repossessed yung ibinibigay sa akin at may laman pa. Hindi na brand new, repossessed ang bahay at may laman pa," said Santos, who only has a "permit to occupy" in her hands.

She continued, "Ang ginawa ng isang tauhan niya, tinanggalan lang ng isang jalousy, sinilip namin doon sa loob. Nandoon pa nga lahat ng gamit dahil naremata nga daw."

The complainant was really disappointed especially when she recalled what Wowowee host Willie told her during the day she won as the second-prize winner of "Big Time Pera o Bayong." She said, "Sinabi pang ganun, 'Naku, nanay, magandang bahay 'yan sa Saint Monique [Valais], kaloob ng Globe Asiatique, kumpleto ang gamit."

When she asked a staff of Globe Asiatique, she learned that the house that was shown to her would cost only P550,000—half the price of the house she supposedly won and worth less than the third winner's P1 million prize.

Santos added that the house was probably the prize of the winning contestant of Wowowee's "Want More, No More" segment, which replaced "Bigtime Pera o Bayong."

Globe Asiatique allegedly told her that she still has to wait for 10-15 days to give the former occupants time to take their things out of the house.

"Ano ba naman ako, kawawa naman ako. Hindi na nga natupad 'yong walang gamit, 'tapos luma pa [ang bibigay]. Kaya nga nagrereklamo ako. Bukod na sa luma na, repossessed lang, hindi pa fully furnished," commented Santos.

The complainant said that she could not be wrong about the house and lot that was promised to her because the "Bigtime" winner on July 1, 2008—which was only a week before Santos won—had shown her brand new, single detached, and fully furnished house in an episode of Rated K last August 2008.

Hence, she questioned the staff from Wowowee by saying, "Bakit po si Mary Ann, nanalo noong July 1, pinakita sa [programa ni] Korina Sanchez 'yong bahay na napanalunan?' sabi ko. 'Etching lang po 'yon,' sabi ni Ivy. 'Hindi po talaga 'yon ang bahay na binibigay, nakiusap lang po sila sa Globe Asiatique.'"

The same Wowowee staff allegedly told her, "Hindi naman porke nanalo kayo ng house and lot, mansion na ang mapapanalunan n'yo. Pasalamat pa nga kayo, nanay, may house and lot kayo. Ang dapat ninyong ginawa, nagsimba kayo, nagpasalamat kayo at may house and lot na kayo.'"

FILING A COMPLAINT. Nena Santos is now planning to seek help from the Department of Trade and Industry (DTI) to be able to own the house that she won in Wowowee.

She also took this opportunity to call the attention of Wowowee contestants who may have the same fate as hers. She suspected that she's not the only winning contestant who experienced this kind of treatment.

Santos narrated, "Kasi tinanong ko [sa Globe Asiatique], 'Ako lang ba ang nagrereklamo?'"

The Globe Asiatique staff allegedly replied, 'Hindi po, kasi marami rin ang nagrereklamo.'

She continued telling the staff from the real estate developer, "'Ang akala ko kasi 'yong makukuha ko katulad ng sa Rated K.' [The staff replied], 'Oho, 'yon ang pagkakamali, dapat ipakikita nila kung ano ang ibibigay nila.'"

Santos also told PEP that her family has lost interest in watching their favorite noontime show. "Kaya nga sabi ko, hindi naman pala totoo 'yan. Kaya ngayon, hindi na kami masyado nanonood ng Wowowee. Dati talagang [tutok] kami sa Wowowee," she ended.

Meanwhile, ABS-CBN lady boss Charo Santos-Concio already issued a statement regarding the "complaints" yesterday, February 24, via "Flash Report." A copy of the statement will be posted here in PEP.

Main link: http://www.pep.ph/news/20950/PEP-EXCLUSIVE:-<em>Wowowee<-em>-winner-complains-about-the-"repossessed"-house-and-lot-prize

The importance of backlinks

If you've read anything about or studied Search Engine Optimization, you've come across the term "backlink" at least once. For those of you new to SEO, you may be wondering what a backlink is, and why they are important. Backlinks have become so important to the scope of Search Engine Optimization, that they have become some of the main building blocks to good SEO. In this article, we will explain to you what a backlink is, why they are important, and what you can do to help gain them while avoiding getting into trouble with the Search Engines.

What are "backlinks"? Backlinks are links that are directed towards your website. Also knows as Inbound links (IBL's). The number of backlinks is an indication of the popularity or importance of that website. Backlinks are important for SEO because some search engines, especially Google, will give more credit to websites that have a good number of quality backlinks, and consider those websites more relevant than others in their results pages for a search query.

When search engines calculate the relevance of a site to a keyword, they consider the number of QUALITY inbound links to that site. So we should not be satisfied with merely getting inbound links, it is the quality of the inbound link that matters.
A search engine considers the content of the sites to determine the QUALITY of a link. When inbound links to your site come from other sites, and those sites have content related to your site, these inbound links are considered more relevant to your site. If inbound links are found on sites with unrelated content, they are considered less relevant. The higher the relevance of inbound links, the greater their quality.

For example, if a webmaster has a website about how to rescue orphaned kittens, and received a backlink from another website about kittens, then that would be more relevant in a search engine's assessment than say a link from a site about car racing. The more relevant the site is that is linking back to your website, the better the quality of the backlink.

Search engines want websites to have a level playing field, and look for natural links built slowly over time. While it is fairly easy to manipulate links on a web page to try to achieve a higher ranking, it is a lot harder to influence a search engine with external backlinks from other websites. This is also a reason why backlinks factor in so highly into a search engine's algorithm. Lately, however, a search engine's criteria for quality inbound links has gotten even tougher, thanks to unscrupulous webmasters trying to achieve these inbound links by deceptive or sneaky techniques, such as with hidden links, or automatically generated pages whose sole purpose is to provide inbound links to websites. These pages are called link farms, and they are not only disregarded by search engines, but linking to a link farm could get your site banned entirely.

Another reason to achieve quality backlinks is to entice visitors to come to your website. You can't build a website, and then expect that people will find your website without pointing the way. You will probably have to get the word out there about your site. One way webmasters got the word out used to be through reciprocal linking. Let's talk about reciprocal linking for a moment.

There is much discussion in these last few months about reciprocal linking. In the last Google update, reciprocal links were one of the targets of the search engine's latest filter. Many webmasters had agreed upon reciprocal link exchanges, in order to boost their site's rankings with the sheer number of inbound links. In a link exchange, one webmaster places a link on his website that points to another webmasters website, and vice versa. Many of these links were simply not relevant, and were just discounted. So while the irrelevant inbound link was ignored, the outbound links still got counted, diluting the relevancy score of many websites. This caused a great many websites to drop off the Google map.

We must be careful with our reciprocal links. There is a Google patent in the works that will deal with not only the popularity of the sites being linked to, but also how trustworthy a site is that you link to from your own website. This will mean that you could get into trouble with the search engine just for linking to a bad apple. We could begin preparing for this future change in the search engine algorithm by being choosier with which we exchange links right now. By choosing only relevant sites to link with, and sites that don't have tons of outbound links on a page, or sites that don't practice black-hat SEO techniques, we will have a better chance that our reciprocal links won't be discounted.

Many webmasters have more than one website. Sometimes these websites are related, sometimes they are not. You have to also be careful about interlinking multiple websites on the same IP. If you own seven related websites, then a link to each of those websites on a page could hurt you, as it may look like to a search engine that you are trying to do something fishy. Many webmasters have tried to manipulate backlinks in this way; and too many links to sites with the same IP address is referred to as backlink bombing.

One thing is certain: interlinking sites doesn't help you from a search engine standpoint. The only reason you may want to interlink your sites in the first place might be to provide your visitors with extra resources to visit. In this case, it would probably be okay to provide visitors with a link to another of your websites, but try to keep many instances of linking to the same IP address to a bare minimum. One or two links on a page here and there probably won't hurt you.

There are a few things to consider when beginning your backlink building campaign. It is helpful to keep track of your backlinks, to know which sites are linking back to you, and how the anchor text of the backlink incorporates keywords relating to your site. A tool to help you keep track of your backlinks is the Domain Stats Tool. This tool displays the backlinks of a domain in Google, Yahoo, and MSN. It will also tell you a few other details about your website, like your listings in the Open Directory, or DMOZ, from which Google regards backlinks highly important; Alexa traffic rank, and how many pages from your site that have been indexed, to name just a few.

Another tool to help you with your link building campaign is the Backlink Builder Tool. It is not enough just to have a large number of inbound links pointing to your site. Rather, you need to have a large number of QUALITY inbound links. This tool searches for websites that have a related theme to your website which are likely to add your link to their website. You specify a particular keyword or keyword phrase, and then the tool seeks out related sites for you. This helps to simplify your backlink building efforts by helping you create quality, relevant backlinks to your site, and making the job easier in the process.

There is another way to gain quality backlinks to your site, in addition to related site themes: anchor text. When a link incorporates a keyword into the text of the hyperlink, we call this quality anchor text. A link's anchor text may be one of the under-estimated resources a webmaster has. Instead of using words like "click here" which probably won't relate in any way to your website, using the words "Please visit our tips page for how to nurse an orphaned kitten" is a far better way to utilize a hyperlink. A good tool for helping you find your backlinks and what text is being used to link to your site is the Backlink Anchor Text Analysis Tool. If you find that your site is being linked to from another website, but the anchor text is not being utilized properly, you should request that the website change the anchor text to something incorporating relevant keywords. This will also help boost your quality backlinks score.

Building quality backlinks is extremely important to Search Engine Optimization, and because of their importance, it should be very high on your priority list in your SEO efforts. We hope you have a better understanding of why you need good quality inbound links to your site, and have a handle on a few helpful tools to gain those links.

Main article: http://www.webconfs.com/importance-of-backlinks-article-5.php