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Link Popularity

The search engines not only measure the content on every page of your site using a specific algorithm, there also is what we call off-page factors that contribute to your site’s resulting PageRank in Google and internet traffic. One of the factors that major search engine Google considers is link popularity.

What is ‘link popularity’?
Basically, link popularity is the number of links pointing to a website. The more sites that link to you, the better the chance that your site will rank high in the search engine results. However, the quantity of links does not spell all when it comes to success in link popularity. The quality of your site and the sites linking to you also factor in the results posted by the search engines.

Relevance of content is another significant element to consider. Industry or topic related sites that link to you are given a higher value compared to non-related links. Each site that links to you is weighed depending on that site’s PR and since the major search engines are run with their own different algorithms, other off-page factors need to be examined from the anchor text of links, relevance, pre-indexed pages, to site structures and some others.

Link popularity not only has the benefit of increasing your PR and traffic, it establishes a legitimate relationship with a related site which is an important aspect that a number of SEO outfits often overlook. While it’s a whole lot easier to utilize preset email templates and sending it by bulk, this method of acquiring links is liable to be ignored by prospective link partners or worse, get you reported as a spammer who sends out unsolicited junk mail. Obviously, we don’t want this to happen.

What’s the solution?
One solution is to select and review a good number of industry related sites before creating a customized link exchange request for each of those sites. It might take some time but the link back rate would definitely go up instead of just sending out thousands of email hoping for a hit instead of a miss. This way, you reduce or eliminate the possibility of a spam complaint and you’ll give your prospective link partners more than enough reason to link back to your site.

Patience is truly a virtue in link building processes. So don’t expect results overnight after you have exhausted your linking campaigns. There are a lot of factors to consider. First of all, you can hardly know the time span by which your link request gets approved. Secondly, updates of search engines particularly that of Google, is quite undeterminable. Sometimes you’re lucky enough that after your optimization processes, you get indexed in about a month or two; else you wait for another 3 to 6 months maximum.

During PageRank’s launch in 1998, it was somehow resolved that Google’s algorithm was focusing mainly on a site’s link popularity. So all it takes for a site to top the SERP’s of Google is to have the largest number of sites, among its competitors, linked to it. With this known to internet public, scheming webmasters have developed dirty tactics to inflate their rankings in the search engines. One popular method is through link farming. Link farms are sites that are made only for the purpose of linking to other sites.

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