Link Popularity

Link popularity is how popular your site is in terms of how many sites link back to yours.

Links to your site are important because they cast a vote that search engines tally to determine how important your site is. Links to your site are called many different things such as inbound links, incoming links, backlinks etc. They all mean the same thing and the more you have the better. Well that isn’t entirely true. The more quality links your site has the better. Quality links are ones that are relevant, oneway and from quality sites.

What determines a quality link?

Well I’m glad you asked. There are many factors that determine the quality of a link. These are

• Link relevancy – is the site related to yours
• Link density – is your link on a page with few links
• Link title – does the anchor text of the link describe your site
• One way – is the link reciprocated or not
• Age of linking site – older sites are sometimes seen as authorities
• IP or GEO location – links from sites that are on different IP’s or in different locations

How do you get quality links?

Getting quality sites to link to yours takes work. If you build a website that people find usefull it will be more likely linked to from webmasters running related sites. This means building up great content. If people enjoy your site they will link to it.

If you have a site that is new and doesn’t really have unique or special content then it is much harder to get people to link back, unless they are in the same boat. This is where exchanging links comes in. Two webmasters agree to link to each other in hopes of increasing their link popularity. Link exchanges are widely popular but search engines are catching on and penalizing webmasters that have intensive link exchange campaigns.

If you run a website for any considerable amount of time then you will most likely receive link exchange requests from other webmasters. You don’t have to accept any link exchange request that comes along. In the email there might be a link to the specified page your link will be on. Check the page out. Does it have tons of other unrelated links on it? Does the page have zero or low Pagerank? Stay away from exchanging links with webmasters who are blindly exchanging links with anyone. You might not be penalized by exchanging links with them but doing so will most likely not benefit your site at all. For quality control purposes do the link requesting yourself.

Give Away Content

One great way to get one way incoming links is to give away free content, scripts or templates. This is also a good way to establish yourself as an authority on your subject. Distributing free content does a few things. First it gets your name and url out there. If the quality of the content is good then other webmasters will be more inclined to use it. If you write articles, write scripts or build templates to give away make sure you include terms of usage. Make sure users have to keep your link in place so that you get a link back. It’s a fair request and webmasters are more then happy to link back especially if your site provides quality content and looks nice.

Text Link Advertising

Advertising on sites via text links is a popular way to get high quality one way links to your site. A few years ago you could buy up thousands of links very cheap and boost your site to the top of the search engines. Search engine have gotten smarter though with the popularity of this method. Now I would say buying a few links is acceptable but only if you buy only 1 link from a site at a time. It’s a great way for new sites to boost Pagerank and get indexed faster. Text links can be expensive and the price depends on a few factors such as Pagerank of the site, how much traffic the site gets and where the link is placed. Right now the going price for a link on a Pagerank 5 site is about $50 per month. Keep in mind that if you are looking to boost your sites Pagerank it might take up to 3+ months to see an increase. This is because Google only updates it’s info every few months and because there is no set schedule it is hard to determine how long your link needs to be up.

How to find your link popularity

There are a few ways to check how popular your site is in regards to backlinks, or the number of people linking to you.  Of course you can use the Google toolbar to simply see # of backlinks… but they will only show you a few of the possible backlinks you have.  I suggest using Yahoo to check your backlinks.  Simply go to Yahoo.com and type in:

link:http://yourwebsiteurl.com

You can also use Google’s webmaster tools to find how many links your site has, as well as see what subpages of your site have links pointing to them.  You might be surprised at what you find.