Link Popularity & Search Engines

What is link popularity and what does it mean in terms of SEO?

What is Link Popularity?

In a simple sentence link popularity is the number of web sites that have a link to your website. Link Popularity is a method of measuring how popular your website is on the internet among a certain group of websites.

Link Popularity is the number of inbound links to your website. Link Popularity is becoming more and more important in search engine algortihms when they determine if you site will come up in a search results page or not. The most well-known of the SEs to incorporated link popularity is Google; however it Google pagerank has had a decline in value over the last year or so.

Link Popularity is a complex system. If you visit a message board on this issue, you will note many different opinions exist. It is a system that is always evolving and changing so having up to date information about link popularity is very important; although some basic factors of link popularity will probably never change.

Unfortunately understanding search engines is not an easy process, since the search engine algorithms are not available to the public and are kept secret.

Why is Link Popularity Important?
A well planned link building campaign can dramatically increase traffic to your web site through improving search engine optimization. Another benefit is that well placed links are an excellent source of consistent and targeted traffic. Most of the major search engines now factor Link Popularity into their relevancy algorithms. As a result, increasing the number of quality, relevant sites which link to your site can actually improve your search engine rankings. There is still no one method to getting good rankings, but boosting your site’s incoming links may give it the edge it needs.

Knowing who links to your site and increasing the number of quality links is an important part of any web site promotion effort. These are the factors that search engines will look at when analyzing your website. It is also important to put an emphasis on gaining ‘quality’ links; link farms or spam link directories will not help in your online promotion efforts.

Tips when Improving Link Popularity
1. Promote traffic to your website & increase your search engine rankings. Search Engines, such as Google or Yahoo, will look closely at your Link Popularity. Who is linking to you? Who do you link to? These are questions the search engines ask.

2. The number of links are important but it is the theme or topic of the links which is even more so. Having links pointing to you from websites within your theme or topic,will cause your website to be seen as being more “important” then a website with just has bunch of random links.

3. Try and get text links compared to graphic links. The text used to describe a link can help with search engine ranking. If that text contains a targeted keyword, then the search engines will looked upon that link more “favorable” or see it being more pertinent.

So what do you need to evaluate when building links? For sites you are linking with:• What are their keywords, theme, topic?
• Will their visitors be interested in your subject matter?
• Who is linked to them?

Once the links are up and running:
• How much traffic am I getting from the links?
• How is my search engine ranking improving?

Keep in mind that search engines only recognize a fraction of the actual total of links going to your site. Link popularity is based on links that the search engines have indexed in their database. The search engines are constantly reindexing their databases,so which and how many links a search engine sees pointing to you can vary from time to time.

Remember that link popularity is much more than a measure of how many links point to a site. Search engines use far more sophisticated formulas to gauge how popular sites are. In general, however, link popularity is measured by the following three factors:

1. Number of Links – The more, the better. Although lots of irrelevant links are less effective than a few relevant ones, they’re better than nothing. Inktomi, a company that provides search results to engines like HotBot, still values the number of links more than anything else.

2. Relevance – Search engines prioritize incoming links from pages that are relevant to the page in question. For example, if you sell toys, a link from a Tyco can boost your rankings more than one from your cousin’s automotive website.

3. Link text – The text used to describe a link can also affect your rankings. You should have links going to your site be descriptive. Rather than “http://www.toys.com” you should have links like “Buy baby toys online” Search engines won’t automatically know every time you develop a new link. Since link popularity is search-engine specific, you need to make sure sites linking to you are indexed by every engine. Submit pages with links to your site to search engines so they can be indexed and start affecting your link popularity.