Link popularity refers to the number of web pages that link to your site. This has become a critically important factor in not only how search engine optimization (SEO) affects your website ranking on the search engines but also for driving visitors to your website.
Unfortunately, new sites and sites with low link popularity are at a severe disadvantage in that they must compete with sites that have been up for years and have thousands of links pointing to them. This is a main reason why organic search engine optimization can take months to have full affects on the search engines. Here is some evidence why.
Search engines place the highest value on sites that have the most links pointing to them. This indicates to the search engines that your site is valuable to others. The more links you have, the more valuable you are and, in turn, the higher your site will rank. Translation – the more links the better!
Of course, link popularity is just one of 200 different factors that Google uses in its algorithm to decide which sites rank and which do not. This was put into practice to keep the junk or “spammy†content at the bottom of the search results.
There is a right way to get links and there is a wrong way to get links. Getting too many links too fast is not natural and you can be penalized for it. Getting links on link farm sites or sites that are currently banned by Google will cost you rankings. Unless it is new, never link to a site that does not have page rank; and never link to a site that is not a viable business on its own.
Although search engines do not state that they dislike unpopular sites, it's easy to read between the lines:
1. Google discourages the manual submission of your site, instead stating that the search engine will find your site by following links pointing to it from other websites. This is why CyberMark does not manually submit to Google. We are patient and wait until Google finds links to our customers' sites.
Google says (in its FAQ's) that submitting to the search engine is not necessary and that “The best way to ensure Google finds your site is for your page to be linked from lots of pages on other sites. Google’s robots jump from page to page on the Web via hyperlinks, so the more sites that link to you, the more likely it is that we’ll find you quickly.â€
Yahoo says (in its FAQ's) that “The Yahoo! Search index, which contains several billion web pages, is more than 99% populated through the free crawl process. Yahoo! Search crawls the web every 2-4 weeks and automatically finds new content for indexing.â€
MSN advises (in its Site Owner Help section) to “Make sure that each page is accessible by at least one static text link.â€
2. Listings can (and frequently do) drop from Google if you are not getting continuous links to your website. In Google's FAQ's it states the following as a possible reason for a site dropping in the rankings: “The contents of your page or the links pointing to your page changed significantly and you no longer have a sufficiently high Page Rank.â€
3. Once your website is included in a search engine's listings, sites with higher link popularity are heavily favored and will rank higher accordingly.
Google says (in its Technology Overview section) that “PageRank relies on the uniquely democratic nature of the web by using its vast link structure as an indicator of an individual page's value.†Again, this means the more inbound links you have the better your rankings.
Yahoo suggests (in its FAQ's), that you should “Correspond with webmasters and other content providers and build rich linkages between related pages,†to improve the ranking of your website in their search results.
MSN says (in its Site Owner Help section), “The MSN Search ranking algorithm analyzes factors such as page content, the number and quality of sites that link to your pages, and the relevance of your site's content to keywords.â€
If you would like more information about inbound link building for your website, you may contact CyberMark for a free consultation.
