What is link popularity? Quite simply, link popularity is the number of incoming links to your website. You can say that link popularity is just a part of what search engines look at when they examine the back links of a website, and this is how it looks.
Search engines typically look at:
The number of sites that link your website. Remember THAT. The “number of sites” that link to your website.
Important: The more websites that link to your site, the higher you will rank. Regardless of how on topic these links are. 100 links from non-related websites is ALWAYS better than no links at all. You should always accept a link request unless the website has a “gray barred” Google Page Rank.
How important are the websites that link to yours.
The importance of the linking website is a central pillar of search engine rankings. In other words, all links are not created equal. A link from an important website carries more weight than a link from a low-key, not-so-important website. On the other hand, as I’ve said above.
Any link, no matter how non-related OR what their Page Rank is, is better than having no link at all. You should always accept link from anyone that’s willing to trade, unless of course, they are penalized and have a gray Google PR as shown above.
So how does link popularity figure into all this?
Search engines have ONE sole purpose:
To provide users with the most relevant content that is ranked by its quality.
In pursuit of this goal, search engines have developed sophisticated algorithms that rank web pages for relevancy and quality. In determining relevancy, search engines tend to measure on-page factors such as relevant content – on-page optimization is dedicated towards improving your website’s relevancy in the eyes of search engines. For determining quality, search engines have moved towards inbound links and their quality as a measure of a website’s importance or quality. Why is this?
Much of this move has to do with Google’s Page Rank algorithm. The concept is simple: Links are the easiest and most impartial methods of determining how popular a website or a web page is. Taken in reverse, this also means that quality resources will eventually be the most popular, thus making links a direct factor in influencing the search engine’s “quality” ratings for any website.
The rise of link popularity in search engine optimization is founded on the principle that great sites will naturally attract many links, and content-poor sites will have difficulty attracting any links. While this has been badly abused by black-hat SEO techniques, the fact remains that the system is correct in principle, and search engines are continuously working to remove problems that rise because of dubious and unethical optimization techniques.
While Google was and is the front runner in giving importance to link-popularity, other major search engines such as Yahoo, MSN Search and AltaVista have also given importance to link popularity, making it a critical component of your search engine strategy.