SeoArt

Link popularity April 2, 2008

Are your links popular? When search engine decides that other sites quite often are linking to your site it means that you’re on the right way and your site deserves pickup in rankings. Obviously people link to good interesting sites, not bad ones.

You need to know that Google PR doesn’t mean link popularity. The fact of the matter is that these things are different. Actually to make it clear PR means amount of links popularity. While page rank focuses strictly on the quantity and popularity of links, link popularity adds a quality factor into the equation. Regrettably a lot of people fail to understand this difference that lead to confusion.

Being sophisticated and powerful machines, all major search engines pay attention to link popularity in their ranking algorithms. There seem to be 2 major types of links that are the best and most efficient to raise your link popularity: links from other sites, focusing on the same keyword phrases you site focuses on and links coming from major directories and industry-specific portals with relevant categories. If site doesn’t constitute quality links you should avoid it. even if you submit your site to 1000 of bad sites you’ll not win link popularity but in spite of it these sites can help your PR to occupy a higher position.

The way link popularity work

The link popularity works in the following way:

Let’s imagine that Sam’s Pizza Castle Website has a link to Jim’s Clothing site. If the link has the keywords “men’s clothing store” in the anchor text (the clickable part), it may help Jim’s link popularity a little bit for those keywords. However, Jim would benefit a lot more if the same link came from a site that was more related to Jim’s site than a pizza castle. For example, a more related link might be from a woman’s clothing store, a men’s shoe store or any other type of store that relates to clothing in some way. Relevance plays a great role. The more relevant site links to your site the higher link popularity you’ll have.

An even higher-quality link for Jim’s might be from “Bill’s Clothing Store Directory,” which lists a whole bunch of clothing stores that can be found on the Internet. That is exactly the kind of link that the search engines would want to credit toward link popularity. Again, the key is in having that common subject between the sites.