Link popularity is one of the buzzwords of website search engine marketing, a hot topic on just about any site to do with optimizing web sites for the search engines. 

Google.com, which has been the largest and most popular search engine in the last several years, uses link popularity to determine the order in which search results will appear.

The basic idea is that a link to a website page from other websites counts as a vote.  The more votes your page has, the more popular it is. 

Using a sophisticated evaluation system, Google analyzes links coming in to each page it indexes.   The page rank assigned is numerical, from 0 - 9, with 9 being the highest ranking. 

Based on studies of Google’s online tutorials, guidelines and blog posts, here’s a simplified explanation (in reality it is a great deal more complex) of how links to your web page are evaluated:

The highest value is given for a natural link located in the midst of editorial content that is relevant to your web page.  The higher the page rank of the page linking to yours is, the more valuable the “vote” is.  

Relevance is based on the keywords that are found in the link on the other site’s page.  If the link uses your exact keywords, that’s even better but related keywords have value too.  This typically happens when a high ranking page discusses your keyword topic and provides a link to your site as part of the discussion or as a credit of some kind.

Links to your web page from pages that are relevant to your own are considered to be votes so long as they are not paid links from sites selling links to inflate link popularity, on pages that contain only links, or other linking methods that Google has identifed as methods to specifically manipulate link popularity.  Manipulative links do not pass any value if Google has found a means to detect them.

Deliberately manipulative links placed on directories of links or on non-revelant pages will probably not add any link popularity, and in extreme cases may reduce link popularity.  This is particularly true of link pages where entire networks of websites exchange links, with every site linking to every site on the exchange.

Reciprocal links do not appear to have any particular value one way or another in terms of link popularity, especially where the links are exchanged on pages of links set up to trade links.  If there is a demerit for these types of links, it is only on the page where the reciprocal links appear.

It is important to understand that page ranking in terms of link popularity does not apply to an entire website.  Page rank is individually assigned to each specific page on a website.  You can have several PR7 pages, a number of PR 2- 3 pages and pages that have no PR value on your website. 

It is also important to understand that link popularity is only one of many measuring methods that Google uses when assessing and assigning the value of web pages.   It is definitely not the only deciding factor for determining the order in which search results appear.  A page with a lower page rank can appear before a higher ranking page if it is more relevant.

You have to keep in mind that the search engines are trying to serve their visitors with the most relevant, highest quality web pages for their search words as their number one goal.   They are constantly tweaking and changing their formulas to achieve that and from time to time, will make very extreme changes if they think it will serve better results.

When in doubt, go to the search engine’s own guideline and webmaster tutorial pages.  They keep them up to date and post important changes they’ve made.

Even if the search engines do make massive changes to how they rank pages, you really can’t go wrong writing excellent content that other sites will link to.  Don’t forget that their visitors will click on those links and come to your website, and this can mean a lot of new visitors to your website.  Excellent search results is job one for search engines.  Visitors who are interested in what you have to offer is your job one so don’t discount a method of gaining more visitors just because it doesn’t improve your search engine rankings.

 

 

Keywords:Google keywords link exchanges link popularity natural link page rank page ranking PR reciprocal links search engine

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 31st, 2007 at 8:30 pm and is filed under Linking Strategies, Search Engine Marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.