What Is "Link Popularity" and Why Should You Care?

The number of links that point to your website, plus the overall quality of the websites with those links... all taken together and averaged out is what determines your 'Link Popularity'.

According to Wikipedia:

"The philosophy of link popularity is that important sites will attract many links. Content-poor sites will have difficulty attracting any links. Link popularity assumes that not all incoming links are equal, as an inbound link from a major directory carries more weight than an inbound link from an obscure personal home page. In other words, the quality of incoming links counts more than sheer numbers of them."

Quality may count for more than quantity for link popularity, but the other side of the coin is that the more incoming links you have, the more traffic your website will receive.

It should also be noted that the links leading off your website do have a small impact on how search engines determine the overall quality of your website. If your website links to a lot of poor-quality websites, it will drain a little of your page-rank... but, since you cannot control other websites, you cannot be penalized for having a lot of poor-quality websites that link to yours.

  How To Check Your Link Popularity

There is a very simple way to check the link popularity for your website. Just go to Altavista, MSN, Yahoo and Google and search for: link:http://yoursite.com. They give you very different totals, but they also show you a list of all the pages with a link to your website.

  Getting Quality Links To Your Website

The best incoming links are from well-ranked websites that place your link within their own content in a natural manner, as a service to their readers.

To put it another way, if a webmaster or directory editor thinks your website has information that would be of some sort of benefit for their audience, and they place a link to you in an editorial or article or some such content, then that link carries a lot more weight than a link placed on a link-trade style page on the same website.

The best - virtually the only - way to get that type of link is simply to have great content. Great content will make your website link-worthy and people will be eager to tell their friends and visitors about your website.

The link-worthiness of your website is the most important thing that determines the number of quality incoming links you get.

You can provide link-worthy content with articles, product reviews, editorials, reprinted articles, printable checklists, ebooks... use your imagination, but stay focused on your website topic.

Nor does it matter if your website is strictly entertainment, a source of information only, or if you are selling something. Provide good content with regular updates and other webmasters will link to you.

Once your website is link-worthy, submit it to directories. Not just DMOZ & Yahoo, but also regional and local directories and any thematic directories that may relate to your website theme.

Then work on getting quality content-based link trades with related websites. Try to concentrate on websites that already have decent page rank, but don't ignore zero-ranked related websites with good content, because they will have better page rank soon enough.

Try to find ways to incorporate links to other websites within your own editorial content, and look for ways that those websites could include your link in a similar fashion.

Then send them a short, personal note telling them what you've done and suggesting how they could reciprocate that type of link. You may have to explain the benefit of including links in a natural way within the content, as well as give them concrete examples and ready to use copy, but it's worth the effort if they comply.

It may be difficult, if not impossible, to incorporate several hundred (or a few thousand) links into your content. So you will probably still want to have an 'old style' link trade program going.

When you are setting up your link trade section make sure that you design it with your visitors in mind. Make it user friendly and a helpful resource for them, and you will get the full benefit from it.

Other ways to generate quality inbound links are to write articles and submit them to article directories, posting in popular forums, and writing reviews at websites that allow user comments. Writing short viral ebooks and giving them away can work too. Indeed: almost any freebie that you can give away will generate a number of inbound links.

One more thing that should be mentioned - if you have the budget for it, you can simply buy links on popular websites. Either by finding them yourself and making a purchase or by using a service like TextLinkBrokers.com or Text-Link-Ads.com to place them for you.

  What To Avoid.

Some websites with link-trade sections created a few years ago - when quantity was all that mattered - are now considered link farms. Fortunately they are fairly easy to spot. Generally, the pages are made for old-style SEO and their link sections don't even try to be user-friendly.

A quick way to identify them is that their link pages are poorly categorized (if at all) and they often have hundreds of links on each page. Many will even have their link pages 'disconnected' from the home page, or buried so deep that they aren't even indexed.

They are the internet equivalent of herpes, so avoid them. Let them link to you if they want, (you can't really stop them) but don't add their link to your website under any circumstances.

Google got wise and the old days are over, and good riddance. If you link to a link farm now, you loose a bit of pagerank. If you run your own link farm, you could loose a lot of page rank.

For that reason, you should always visit a website and check them out before adding their link to a page that you are responsible for. Avoid using link-exchange software or services that automatically add links to your website. It may be easier, but it can also get you a dose of wepes, (web herpes), and radical surgery is the only cure.

  Link Trade Scripts, Services & Software

You should be careful of who you link to, but I'm not saying that you should do everything 'by hand'. That's just too inefficient. There are several good programs that can monitor link trades, just don't use their automatic add-a-link features.

If you aren't using software to monitor link trades yet, take a look at ShaLinks and Link Management Assistant, they are both free, both efficient, and will take some of the tedious work off your hands.

You may also want to avoid link services or automated scripts that send form letters asking for link trades. The services themselves are still good for locating potential partners, but the form letter approach does not work very well anymore.

  Summary

It is not just the number and type of links coming into your website that create success. Getting good in-bound links for link popularity is very important, but it's only one of the strategies you can use.

If you truly want a successful website, build a good, useful place that people will want to return to, understand branding and how it can help you, and promote, promote, promote.

To Your Success!
Tim

By Tim Brown © 2006. About the author: Tim is the webmaster at http://BLT-Web.com, where webmasters can find free tools, advice, tips and other useful resources designed to help them build a successful website.

---

Webmasters & Publishers:
You are welcome to publish this article free of charge on your website, newsletter, or e-zine, provided:
* You don't change the article in any way and all links remain intact.
* You include the entire article, including the "about the author" box.
* In doing so you agree to indemnify the author, blt-web.com and its directors, officers, employees and agents from and against all losses, claims, damages and liabilities which arise out of its use
* I would appreciate it if you send a courtesy copy of your publication to