Link Popularity Basics

Link Popularity Basics

By Alex Skorohodov
KosmosCentral.com

Link Popularity is defined as the number of web sites linked directly to a particular web site. Building a web site is only the first step towards a successful presence on the Internet. In order to generate traffic for your site, web surfers have to be able to find it. Search engines like Google, Yahoo & AOL are the number one doorways to your site and in order for a surfer to find your site it needs to be optimized for; link popularity, keywords, text, image alt tags, url's and then properly submitted to the major search engines.

Quality vs. Quantity

Most of the major search engines will factor in Link Popularity into their relevancy algorithms when ranking web site. pages. Due to these consideratios, the greater the number of quality, relevant links can actually improve your search engine rankings. The sites that are direct competitors and within your business industry will get a much higher relevancy score by the search engines when ranking your site. Keep in mind that there's no one "secret" to achieving the desired high page rank, though raising your site's popularity may give it those extra points in the eyes of search engine spiders.

Search engines such as Google will give higher importance to both the quantity and the quality of these incoming links. If a large number of sites are linked to yours, your site is considered to be an important resource in that particular field and this is why the search engines like to give such a site a higher ranking. Also, if the links to your site are coming from "VIP" or high ranked sites, then your web site is considered still more prominent.

Why would another site link to your page?

Through reciprocal linking, two companies with a common goal, which is increasing their web site rankings and thus boosting internet traffic, can share in providing each other a quality link trade. The shared links page must be submitted and found by search engine spiders from each web site and properly indexed within that engine. Some webmasters will even bury their shared linking page more than two clicks from their home page. We recommend making this shared link page an obvious asset to your site which is easily found from your home page by any knowledgeable web developer.

Please see my article on One Way Linking Vs. Reciprocal linking and how to create one way non reciprocal links for more information.

Don’t be fooled

Reciprocal link programs that are just trading pages of random web site. links not related to your web site. are easily detected by search engine spiders. Having a welding company link to an apparel web site. will not provide the quality linking a search engine spider algorithm is looking for. Thus your site will not rank as high as those with quality links.

Be aware of Link Farms they may provide a link to your site, but it’s not a quality reciprocal link. Google also has been known to ban link farms and web sites that are associated with them. So, by all means our advice is to avoid link farms at all cost.

FFA or Free for All Sites claim to be search engines, which in fact they are not true search engines. They are simply arbitrary lists of links to other sites. No one actually uses FFA sites to search for anything and those that do find your site through an FFA would most likely be an unqualified prospect. These sites exist primarily as a mechanism for collecting e-mail addresses. So beware, if you do make the mistake of joining you'll soon experience a flood of junk e-mail.

Start increasing your site rankings!

Join Kosmos Central’s reciprocal link program and start increasing your web site. rankings! We offer a managed and non-manages service. With our managed service we will locate all quality links, submit and update all changes needed to your shared link’s page.