Introduction to Link Popularity

Link popularity is the total number of web sites that link to your site.

All major search engines rank web pages based on the number of links that point to them. Google uses link popularity as the most important factor when ranking sites. Yahoo, HotBot, AltaVista, MSN and others also use link popularity in their formulas. If you want to have a successful web site, you must have high link popularity. High link popularity is important for high rankings on search engines. The higher your web site ranks on search engines, the more customers you'll get.

Link popularity is the number of links that point to a webpage. Link Popularity is a crucial factor, used by almost all of the search engines to rank websites. Link popularity can be increased by link exchange!

Search engines don't just look at the content of a webpage to determine if it is a good match for a search. Thousands and thousands of webpages contain the same keywords (in different combinations) so matching a search term with a page's content is not enough to build an ordered list of results to a search query.

Search engines also count the number of other webpages that "validate", by linking, that a particular webpage is a good match for a search on certain keywords (link popularity). The text contained in the link that point to a webpage is considered as well. If the text in the link that points to a webpage contains the queried keywords, the search engine considers that webpage a better match to the search query on those keywords.

It is not only the number of the links (link popularity) that counts, but also the "quality" of the links. A link from a good-quality webpage (ranked high by the search engines) matters more than many links from low-ranked webpages.

One of the first search engines that used link popularity as a key factor in ranking websites was Google. One can check the number of links pointing to a website (link popularity) by querying Google with the search keywords "link:http://www.sitename.com" (without the red quotes). Most search engines have similar functions for link popularity check.