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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.
Why
should I worry about link popularity?
A growing number of search engines use
link popularity in their ranking algorithms.
Google
uses it as its most important factor in ranking sites.
HotBot,
AltaVista,
MSN,
Inktomi,
and others also use link popularity in their formulas.
Eventually every major engine will use link popularity, so
developing and maintaining it are essential to your search
engine placement.
Link popularity can do a lot
for your site. Not only will many search engines rank you
higher, but links from other sites will also drive more
traffic to you.
Not just numbers
Link popularity is much more than a
measure of how many links point to a site. Search engines
use far more sophisticated formulas to gauge how popular
sites are. In general, however, link popularity is
measured by the following three factors:
- Number of Links -
The more, the better. Although lots of irrelevant
links are less effective than a few relevant ones,
they're better than nothing.
Inktomi,
a company that provides search results to engines like
HotBot, still values the number of links more than
anything else.
- Relevance -
Search engines prioritize incoming links from pages that
are relevant to the page in question. For example, if
you sell puppy food, a link from a dog food supplier can
boost your rankings more than one from, say, your
sister's gardening site.
- Link text - The
text used to describe a link can also affect your
rankings. These three links all point to the same URL
but use different text:
SearchEngines.com
Search engine resources
Click here
Search engines' spiders figure that any words other
sites use to describe your site are particularly
relevant. So, if lots of sites linking to you use
keywords in their link text, search engines will boost
your ranking for those keywords.
How do I develop quality links?
There are many ways to improve your link
popularity. Perhaps the most effective method is a link
popularity campaign, but this can be time-consuming and
complicated if you don't have a clear plan of action.
Submit new links to search
engines
Every search engine assesses your link
popularity by looking at the sites in its own database.
Each engine's database is unique, so for your link
popularity score with a given engine to be high, all sites
linking to you must be indexed by that engine. Though you
may have 1,000 links in AltaVista's database, if you have
only 100 in Google's then Google will rank you
accordingly.
Search engines won't
automatically know every time you develop a new link.
Since link popularity is search-engine specific, you need
to make sure sites linking to you are indexed by every
engine. Submit pages with links to your site to search
engines so they can be indexed and start affecting your
link popularity. You may want to ask permission from the
sites first. |
Link Popularity
history:
To gain a better understanding of
link popularity it is useful to know why it became so crucial
for search engine rankings. In the past a web page's ranking
was determined, amongst other factors, by the number of
keyword occurrences within 'on-page' elements i.e. in page
text, META tags, title tag. When web developers learned that
they could trick a search engine to return their web pages by
cramming keywords into their pages the search engines had to
get a bit smarter. They were using 'on-page' elements to
determine relevance so it was only natural that they would
look to elements out of direct control of the web page creator
i.e. 'off-page' elements. Search engines made the assumption
that the greater the number of links from other sites pointing
to a web site, the more popular the web site is and therefore
a more quality resource. This worked nicely in theory but in
practice it was also to be abused.
Web site owners figured out
many ways to get links pointing to their web sites one example
of which was through the use of link farms, pages the
contained nothing more than a collection of links, Quantity of
links was being abused so the search engines made use of the
old saying "quality not quantity" and began to assign a
quality factor to each of the links pointing to a web
site. Now web sites that had a higher number of high
quality links were looked upon favorably by the search
engines. Building link popularity became a science in itself
and today is still the most time-consuming and frustrating
activity for a search engine optimizer.
- try to get links from
important web sites
- try to get link texts that
contain your important keywords
- don't use FFA or link farm
pages
- don't use services that
promise lots of links within days
- focus on quality links, not
on quantity
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