Link Popularity

By sam barns

Link popularity corresponds to the total number of web pages that are linked to a particular website or web page. In other words, link popularity is number of links that point towards a webpage. Link popularity is a very critical and important factor, used by most search engines to rank websites and produce them in the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs), since most major search engines support the 'link' operator. The PageRank (PR) of a website is defined depending upon the link popularity, from PR1 up to PR10, the latter denoting the PR of the most relevant and popular site. Almost 85% of Google's rankings are based on the inbound links, proving that link popularity is uniquely the most significant rank-deciding factor.

Major renowned search engines such as Google use algorithms, that calculate the link popularity of the sites containing the keyword phrase, in order to lay down the SERPs for that particular keyword. The search engines calculate the link popularity of a website on the basis of the number of inbound links, relevance and PageRank of incoming links, outgoing links, page content and Meta info.63

Different search engines will calculate the link popularity for various websites containing the keyword, differently. This is because the link popularity calculated would be a representation of the number of inbound links known to that particular search engine, which might not include all the inbound links in the World Wide Web, and varies depending upon the size of the search engine's database. Renowned search engines such as Google apply filters against inbound links, while calculating the link popularity. For e.g., it doesn't not include inbound links from those sites that are banned by Google while calculating the link popularity.

Link popularity is a very important factor since most search engines use it as a rank determining criteria. While calculating the link popularity, it is not just the number of links that counts, but also the quality and relevance of those links. A good quality webpage is one that has a higher PageRank and thus more link popularity. The text contained in the webpage that links towards a site, is also considered, while calculating the link popularity. If that text contains the queried keywords, it is considered as a better match, having more link popularity than the rest. Links from a higher quality webpage will gain the site more link popularity.

Being a very significant factor in SEO, various methods such as 'link exchange' or swapping of links has arisen, to improve the link popularity and in turn the PageRank of websites. Having done link exchanges suitably, a dramatic increase can be noticed in the link popularity if a site.

About the Author

The author is a internet consultant.

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