Link Popularity Guide

Link Popularity is an often misunderstood topic among webmasters and online business owners.In the quest for search engine rankings, link popularity has quickly developed into the single-most important tool for improving your rankings, and in the process, increasing your profits.

So to get a successful website on the web and make easy money online you have to understand the basics of this very important concept and know how to use it appropriately to improve your website visibility and ranking in the searh engines getting highly targeted traffic to your website. That is exactly what you are going to learn here about link popularity in addition to the best ways to increse and improve your link popularity.

What is link popularity?

"A measure of the number and quality of web pages that link to your site."

When determining the link popularity of your site, Search engines typically look at:

The number of sites that link to your website.
How important are the websites that link to yours.

The importance of the linking website plays a central role in search engine rankings. All links do not have equal weight. A link from an "important" website carries more weight than a link from a less important website. Additionally, factors such as relevancy can also influence the importance of a link.

Search engines have one sole purpose: To provide users with the most relevant content (relevant to what they are searching for) that is ranked by its quality.

In pursuit of this goal, search engines have developed sophisticated algorithms that rank web pages for relevancy and quality.

In determining relevancy, search engines tend to measure on-page factors such as relevant content – on-page optimization is dedicated towards improving your website’s relevancy in the eyes of search engines.

In recent years, search engines have moved towards inbound links (Link Popularity) as a major measurement of a website’s importance or quality. Much of this move has to do with Google’s Page Rank algorithm. The concept is simple: Links are the easiest and most impartial methods of determining how popular a website or a web page is.

While Google was and is the frontrunner in giving importance to link-popularity (and with Google serving 40-50 percent of the search engine traffic, you’d be hard pressed to find a reason NOT to build links), other major search engines such as Yahoo, Msn Search and Ask Jeeves (Teoma) have also given importance to link popularity, making it a critical component of your search engine strategy.

High Rankings

It would help if you had a grounding idea on the type of links that could help your website get high search engine rankings. Note that these factors, as well as other important influences on link popularity, will be discussed and elaborated on in detail throughout this guide, so getting a solid grip on the basics of link popularity right from the start is a high priority.

High Page Rank: Page Rank is by far one of the most visible and monetizable methods of determining the importance of a webpage. Despite the criticism, Page Rank remains what it was before – an important, though not a defining element, of establishing link popularity. Having a high page rank on your site may still be necessary if you have a very large site, but high page rank alone will not always get you high rankings for all keywords.
Permanent Links: Link-ageing is a concept that evolved out of the Sandbox theory – a Google-related speculation that has come into the public’s eye since mid-2004. Essentially, Google puts a small restriction or penalty on new websites – this penalty – in part – monitors the "age" of the inbound links of a website. Once a website builds a sufficient threshold of reputation through a combination of quantity and quality (and aged links), the penalty is gradually reduced and then removed. This highlights the importance of getting permanent links to increase your link popularity – it will work on eliminating your Sandbox penalties while "keeping" the reputation you have built today intact for tomorrow.
Site Quality: The quality of a website, as determined by the search engine, is a major factor (along with Page Rank) in establishing the importance of an inbound link. In this regard, different search engines have marginally different criteria that can possibly alter the importance of a link from one search engine to the next. However, on a general scale, this is determined both by on-page factors and inbound links for the linking website itself. Meaning that the higher the quality of sites linking to you, the more important your site will look in the search engines.
Link Relevancy: You should try and obtain links from sites that are relevant to your site’s industry or niche. For example, if you run a fitness website, links from health-related websites would be considered relevant, but links from a website in the real estate niche will make no sense. Different search engines place different levels of importance on relevancy, but this is definitely an important factor to keep in mind.

Building Links

There are several ways that you can build links for your website, and I’ve separated them into two categories to give you a better, more holistic view of how link building works (or can work).

Let’s look at each category, and the different types of techniques involved in both of them.

Active Link-Building
Passive Link-Building

Let’s look at each category, and the different types of techniques involved in both of them.

Active Link-Building

This involves the webmaster (meaning you) actively searching for links by using one or more of the methods listed below. This is a much more common strategy of acquiring links to your website, compared to passive link-building, primarily because of two reasons:

It’s easier to exchange links, submit to directories, and even pay for links, than to let your link-popularity grow naturally.
It gives you measurable results – any active link-building campaign will give the webmaster exact statistics for how many back links have been developed, of which Page Rank, from which URL, etc.

So what are the different methods one can use to actively build links?

One-Way Linking

One-way linking can be done in a few ways:

submitting your website’s URL and description to web directories,
buying links on web pages.

I’ll discuss link purchaseing a little later, but the key factor to note in one-way linking is that you don’t have to link back to the website linking to you.

How does that help you?

Less outbound links on your site, which is an important consideration in some search engines.
One-way links receive greater importance than reciprocal links from search engines – this has a lot to do with deterring the power of search engine optimizers to unfairly inflate a website’s rankings.

Of course, when you are trying to acquire one-way links there is a great, great need to emphasize on link quality and not just sheer link popularity. Build quality links from "important" websites and focus on improving your own website’s quality.

One-way links are often the subject of purchase – website owners routinely aim to sell advertising space on their high-ranking websites (by high-ranking I mean websites with high Page Rank). It is not uncommon to see websites with a Page Rank of 5 offering one-way main page links for $20-$30 a month. In contrast, a website with a PR 9 can probably charge several hundred or thousands of dollars per month for a single text link.

Reciprocal linking

Reciprocal linking involves two websites exchanging links – you link to my site, and I’ll link to yours. This remains the most common form of link-building as this is the cheap, fast way to build your link popularity (although unfortunately, this is a case of trying to win with quantity rather than quality).

Usually, reciprocal linking does not involve any payments, and in most cases websites have dedicated link directories or link pages built primarily for the purpose of link-building.

The benefits? If you have a brand new website, reciprocal linking might sound like your salvation towards gaining high search engine rankings. However, the truth is that with search engines, quality counts more than quantity (especially in the long-run).

If you are running a reciprocal linking campaign, you must take care to seek out quality websites that are willing to link with yours. Your task may become that much harder, but ultimately it will reward your website with consistent traffic and high rankings.

Buying Smart

The key to buying links is having a strategy that fits both your risk tolerance and your budget. Here are a few other points:

Be sure to research your keywords and optimize your site correctly before you begin a linking campaign. Optimizing for the wrong keywords is a waste of your time and money, and building link popularity for a site that does not have quality optimized content is also a waste.
Understand that there is no such thing as an “instant” fix when building link popularity. It is possible to shorten the time it takes to rank well but if you build links too quickly, especially with a site that is new or doesnt have many other links yet, you could end up delaying the results rather than speeding them up.
If you have the time and the desire to learn, there are tools and programs available that will allow you to effectively build your link popularity on a small budget. I will go into more depth on these programs below.

If you are looking to build your link popularity, you don’t have time to do it yourself, or you would just rather have an expert do it, visit TextLinkBrokers.com and learn first-hand how powerful buying links can be for your rankings. Whether or not you decide to buy from them, Textlinkbrokers has an excellent staff that is always willing to help point you in the right direction.

Passive Link-Building

Passive link-building is unpredictable – you can never quantify or monetize such an effort, and because of this exact problem, most webmasters choose not to rely on it.

On the other hand, there are real-world examples of websites that have soared into popularity by mainly using passive link-building and have gained popularity through word-of-mouth and quality content. Not through active link-building techniques.

Passive link-building is all about natural link-building and as such, does not involve any specific technique.

Natural link-building

Natural link-building is, in fact, the cornerstone of site-to-site linking, as search engines understand and define it. As I’ve mentioned earlier, search engines justify using link popularity as a ranking tool on the argument that good quality sites will naturally attract links – people will link voluntarily to good quality websites without prompting or active link-building campaigns. In the same vein, poor-quality websites will not have mass appeal within their niche, and thus will not get as many links.

Link popularity has been severely abused in the past few years, ever since Google initiated Page Rank and focused on link popularity. However, natural link-building is still a powerful phenomenon, and if you browse through websites of a niche, it is quite likely that you will find links pointing to an authority website.

The lesson? Even in a world where people are trying to buy search engine rankings by artificially building links, webmasters and online business owners continue to link to "useful" content on the Internet and continue to provide their visitors with "resources".

It is a good idea to focus on building quality content even if your main strategy includes purchasing links to artificially increase your link popularity. In the long run, those that do both will more likely be the ones at the top.