Link Popularity Explained

Link Popularity is considered to be one of the most important criteria in the search engines determining your web site's position in their results listings (also known as ranking). It refers to the number of links pointing to your site from search engines, directories and high ranking sites with content related to yours. The more relevant incoming links a web site has, the more important search engines consider it, and consequently give it a higher ranking.

Various studies have shown that the quality of incoming links to your site is just as important as the number of links. Search engines consider links from major search engines and web portals, such as: Google, Yahoo!, MSN and the Open Directory Project; and sites related to your site's content, as votes of support for your site. But, link exchange sites and link farms are consider to be spam. They exist just for improving the link popularity of those pages and sites, and can get your site penalized in the rankings for linking to and from them.

Improving your site's link popularity requires time but is worth the effort .Some experts feel that it is possible to achieve top rankings almost entirely on link popularity alone. So don't underrate the influence that link popularity can have on your web sites ranking.