Measuring Link Popularity

Measuring Link Popularity for Search Engine Optimisation

Google places a very high value on the quantity and quality of other sites linked to your site. The link popularity of your site is one of the major factors which makes Google determine where your site will be ranked for a search. It is an extremely important element of the search engine optimisation process. Search engine optimisation experts should know what link popularity is all about, why it is important and how it is measured by google when ranking a web site.

Link Popularity Defined

Link popularity can be defined as the number of sites that are linking to your site. Some websites might have thousands if not millions of other sites linked to those whilst others will have only a few. The search engines use the number and quality of inbound links to measure the importance and the popularity of your site. This will translate into where your site is ranked for a search on the search engines. 

SEO professionals should also be aware that the number of links though important is not the sole variable being used to determine the link popularity of a site. What the search engines actually look for are links from other sites that is of relevance to the subject matter of your site. For example, if a travel website has most of its inbound links coming from sites with absolutely no relevance to travel this will get a very poor link popularity score. The algorithm that search engines use will take the number of links as well as the relevancy of the content when determining a link popularity score.

Instead of trying to maximize the number of links to a site, search engine optimisation experts should realise, it is possible to achieve higher rankings with a relatively fewer number of superior quality inbound links as opposed to a large number of insignificant inbound links. If I have a site offering flight quotes for travellers with 800 quality inbound links, I might receive a much higher search engine ranking than another similar site that has 8,000 links which branch off from link farms or Free For All (FFA) pages.

Links from link farms and FFA pages

Professionals involved with search engine optimisation should avoid trying to acquire links through link farms or FFA pages; this practice will not only hurt a sites search engine ranking, but might also get it permanently removed from the search engine listings. Links farms are sites where you can directly exchange links with all the sites listed in that directory. FFA pages are meaningless link directories. The search engines typically discount any links that come from either of these sources.

Now that you understand what link popularity is, its importance in the search engine optimisation process and how it works, what needs to be looked at next is how Google measures it. Google uses a number of variables in their algorithm to compute the overall link score. A higher score will always ensure a higher search engine ranking.

One factor obviously being used by Google in their algorithm is the total number of sites linked to a site. The more links you have, the higher your score will be. Nonetheless, their algorithm is a bit more complex than that, it is possible for a website with less links to be ranked higher than a website with more links.

The explanation for this is Google also measures the quality of the inbound links. If your website is about flight quotes, and the site linking to you is an online gaming site, then that is not considered a quality link. The link still helps your score though not as much as a link from a website with subject matter same as yours.

A High Score for Keywords

Another factor considered by Google when computing the link popularity score is whether the content of the page linked to your site relates to your keywords. If the link stems from a page with highly related content to your keywords, your site will get a higher score.

Google gives an even higher score for links with anchor text that coincides with the keywords used to describe your site. For example, if I have a site that sells automobiles, if a blog about automobiles has posted a link to my site, I will get a good score for that link anyways since the site is of highly related content, but it will boost my score further if the link text (also known as anchor text) is Automobiles.

The Keyword Diversity of the Linked Sites

The last factor considered by google to score the link popularity of your site is the multiplicity of keywords contained on sites linking to you. For example, if you have a site that sells shoes, and all the links to your site are from other sites that contain nothing but the keyword Shoes, Google considers that to be unusual. To get a higher score, you need to have links coming from sites that contain a variety of keywords related to handbags, such as Buy Shoes, Leather Shoes, etc.

Increasing your link popularity is not easy, but now you have an understanding as to how your score is calculated, you can develop a plan to improve your score. You might want to consider doing write-ups on forums and blogs about your site with a link to your site. As long as you are determined and adapt your strategy towards Google, you will do fine.