Articles - Link Popularity

Link Popularity - What is Link Popularity and What Does it Mean to My Website?

How does link popularity relate to how popular your website is - that depends on how many web sites link to yours. By checking how many web sites link to your site, you can determine just how visible your web site is. This is an easy and quantifiable way to examine how effective your website is.

Who determines link popularity? Well, when search engines are scrolling through the websites, (the big search engines are generally checking their list of websites every couple of weeks), they can count how many links there are on any given page and where those links point to. When they are done scrolling the web, they calculate up how many links point to each site they have listed in their database, much like “votes” are counted. Most major search engines also factor this data into the search relevancy algorithm. So, the more links the higher on their search engine placement your website will be. If you can increase the number of links to your site, it can dramatically increase your search engine ranking.

A good link popularity report will tell you how many pages in each search engine index point to your website, including internal links from within your own website. List the sites that link to you and determine their popularity. The more links these sites have means the more links that eventually point to yours. Once you know who is linking to you and who links to them, you can strategize how to improve your traffic because you’ll have a better understanding of who your audience is. You can also get information on the link popularity of your competitors. So, if they have more links you can find out where those links are and potentially add them to your list, improving your visibility.

Link popularity does not determine the worth of your website. While it does show how visible your site it, it does not show the number of visitors to your site or how many of those visitors come from these links. Ultimately, link popularity is a good tool to use, along with others to optimize your website. Understanding who and how other websites link to your site and how your competitors fare in comparison gives you information on how to improve your website’s visibility. And, if you can improve your visibility through links you will also improve your search engine ranking and greatly enhance your websites popularity.