Position Strategy

Link Popularity

Web site links are the buttons and underlined text on web pages that take you to other pages when you click them. Your web site's link popularity is a number of web pages that contain links to your web site domain.

Link popularity is a widely used factor and is used by a number of major search engines. Off page or external factors now play a major role in determining top search engine positions. Specifically, link popularity can literally make or break a site's search engine ranking. Hypothetically, if you have two sites that have equal content and equal optimization, then the site with more link popularity will rank higher.

Basically, search engines look at your link popularity several ways.
Most Important Criteria:

1. The number of hyperlinks to your web pages.
2. The Reputation or popularity of the web sites that link to your domain.
3. The Relevance of the web sites that link to your domain.
4. The number of clickthroughs and duration of sessions.

For this reason, it is not wise to shotgun blast your web site to 300,000 search engines, directories, Free For All Pages, etc. Most all the search engine traffic is produced by the top 12 search engines. The others are mostly little traveled and can drag your web site's relevance down. Submit your web site with relevance in mind.

Google considers link popularity to be an important factor in their ranking algorithm. PageRank is the algorithm used by the Google search engine, originally formulated by Sergey Brin and Larry Page in their paper:
The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine.

PageRank is only one part of Google's methodology for ranking how sites come up in their search results but shows the importance of building link popularity. Learn more about the Google Search Engine PageRank system and the magical Google Dance.

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