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What is Link Popularity?
A measure of the quantity and quality of sites that link to your site
Google PageRank
Google searches more sites more quickly, delivering the most relevant results.
Introduction
Google runs on a unique combination of advanced hardware and software. The speed you experience can be attributed in part to the efficiency of our search algorithm and partly to the thousands of low cost PC's we've networked together to create a superfast search engine.
The heart of our software is PageRank™, a system for ranking web pages developed by our founders Larry Page & Sergey Brin at Stanford University. And while we have dozens of engineers working to improve every aspect of Google on a daily basis, PageRank continues to play a central role in many of our web search tools.
PageRank Explained
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. In essence, Google interprets a link from page A to page B as a vote, by page A, for page B. But, Google looks at considerably more than the sheer volume of votes, or links a page receives; for example, it also analyzes the page that casts the vote. Votes cast by pages that are themselves "important" weigh more heavily and help to make other pages "important." Using these and other factors, Google provides its views on pages' relative importance.
Of course, important pages mean nothing to you if they don't match your query. So, Google combines PageRank with sophisticated text-matching techniques to find pages that are both important and relevant to your search. Google goes far beyond the number of times a term appears on a page and examines dozens of aspects of the page's content (and the content of the pages linking to it) to determine if it's a good match for your query.
Integrity
Google's complex automated methods make human tampering with our search results extremely difficult. And though we may run relevant ads above and next to our results, Google does not sell placement within the results themselves (i.e., no one can buy a particular or higher placement). A Google search provides an easy and effective way to find high-quality websites that contain information relevant to your search.
Why Search Engines Measure Links
The best way to discover how people are finding your web site is to analyze your site's activity logs, a topic which is covered in depth on the Keywords Used To Find Your Web Site page available to Search Engine Watch members.
Those unable to analyze their logs can use search engines to track down referral links. In particular, this method gives you an idea of how "popular" a search engine believes your site to be. That's important because all major search engines consider a site's link popularity in their ranking algorithm.
The information below describes how link popularity is measured at popular crawler-based search engines.
Be aware that "popularity" is only one part of the link analysis systems that search engines such as Google use to rank web pages. The quality and context of links is also taken into account, rather than sheer numbers.
Google
To search for pages linking to your site, simply enter your domain this way:
link:searchenginewatch.com
This will return a sampling of pages that have hyperlinks linking to the searchenginewatch.com web site. This would include links such as: http://searchenginewatch.com http://searchenginewatch.com/webmasters/ http://searchenginewatch.com/webmasters/popularity.html
You can narrow the search to a particular URL by being more specific. For example:
link:searchenginewatch.com/webmasters/popularity.html
Note that the URLs entered after link: don't include the www prefix. This is not necessary. The format shown will find links with or without the prefix. The http:// prefix is not necessary, either.
Other Resources
Marketleap Visibility Index
http://www.marketleap.com/publinkpop/
Enter your URL, along with up to three comparison URLs, then see at a glance how you measure up in terms of sheer numbers of links to some major sites on the web. Free, easy to understand and use! You can then click on the report to see link count listings from the major search engines that are queried.
LinkPopularity http://www.linkpopularity.com/ Free and simple service that helps you generate link lists from three major search engines. Results can also be emailed each month.
Compute Your Own Web Traffic Rank
http://www.useit.com/alertbox/relativeranking.html
This isn't really about measuring link popularity, but it is an interesting method of determining the overall popularity of your site. In short, Jakob Nielsen explains that dividing your site's page views by the page views of the web's most popular site tells you how popular your site is.
1. An Introduction To Link Building
Introduction to link building:
how to start
While it is more or less easy to understand what to do before creating a website, getting links may present some difficulty, in a sense that link building is just that..getting links.
Your first link
One of the important things to do is to get your first links to the website. While it may be tempting to get any link you can get, you'd rather focus on getting a link from a relevant and established, trusted website.
Such a link will tell the search engines (Google) that you are a worthy website about your own topic and they'll index you easily. If you can get several relevant links from trusted websites, so much the better.
A good start will also inspire confidence in obtaining links naturally, through providing value to your customers, and will keep you in the right direction (thus saving you lots of efforts, time and trouble in the future).
Keep your link profile clean
Keeping your link profile clean - getting links only from relevant and trusted websites - is important to appear as trusted to the search engines. Of course, the benefit of this approach is that, most likely, you'll be getting targeted traffic from the link, too. But as we are not speaking about marketing a website, but about getting the first link, taking search engine behavior into account here is more important.
While it has long been assumed that internal links can not harm, there are cases when keeping your internal linking profile clean can save you a gray hair or two. Generally, you'll be indexed faster and crawled more frequently.
Some claim that sticking to a single topic, by getting only relevant incoming links and linking to relevant websites, helps Google to categorize your site and deliver targeted traffic. But this theory is only a theory (at least in my knowledge). That being said, it makes sense to stick to one topic or niche to only attract targeted traffic to your site. (If you have content for different target audiences, it'd make sense to split it to several websites.)
Getting the links
Some good ways to get your initial links include:
. a review on a related website (software review, service review)
. a published article on a established journal, magazine, etc
. a mention of a blogger (bloggers tend to have solid, natural linking profiles, so this link is worth a lot)
While the above list is by no means complete, the general criterion will be to find a place, where the news and information about your product/service may be useful for the visitors. Contact the site owner, offer a way to cooperate - provide a quality article on the topic, for example - and see how you can work out a deal to get your site/product reviewed and commented on.
Just make sure you do everything to provide value not only to the relevant site owner, but to the visitors of that site. No hype, self-promotion or deceiving tactics to lure visitors to your site. Excite them with your genuine offer, so the people would click to your site for themselves.
Social marketing (link baiting)
Another way to get links is to create something (an article, a tool, a video, a photo gallery, etc) so unique and useful for your target audience, that they'll refer you to their friends and online communities they are into. This approach is called social marketing and the content you create is called link bait.
Social marketing is done through social bookmarking websites, mainly, however a piece of content may be promoted through forums, blogs, email and other communication avenues. One important issue in social bookmarking is to aim at the value to the visitors.
Creating quality content seems to be the best way to get links and traffic, because you'll not only be getting traffic from the search engines, but also natural links and targeted traffic from the sites that link to you. Especially, if your article or tool or a video is highly popular and linked from hundreds, if not thousands, websites.
Another advantage of this approach is that you'll be gaining links passively, instead of hunting for places to get noticed (you'll need to do this anyway, though, of course).
2. Why Build Links?
Web Page optimization involves involves both on page and off page optimization. On Page optimization involves writing the Web Page around carefully selected keywords, Whereas off page optimization involves building links to the web page from other web pages and other websites.
Most people embark on a linking strategy in an effort to improve their ranking at Google and the search engines in general. As important as this is, it is not the only reason why you should be actively seeking links from other similarly themed sites and directories. Links are also a very important source of traffic.
You may even find that some links bring more traffic than the search engines. In addition, the traffic provided by links is generally consistent and not subject to the vagaries of your search engine ranking.
3. How Do Search Engines Measure Link Quality?
In an era where Search Engines place very high importance in links and popularity for their search algorithms, we can look at different types of links to determine the best factors to use to make an educated decision on quality link building selections.
This tutorial will focus on the selection of links by types of links. In doing this we will determine a high quality link vs. a low quality link. While some experts will like all links from any source, we will focus on specific factors. Some opinions will be expressed here based on experience. Since we do not own any of the Search Engines and they only publicly release certain information, we have to make decisions based on experience rather then defined facts.
First off lets make it clear, we are talking about building links to increase rankings. We are not factoring mathematics for PageRank (PR). PR is not our concern. Rankings will be our concern.
We will discuss several factors of getting links that will include buying links, trading links, trading services for links, earning links, article links, Press Release links, resource page links, reciprocal links and content links.
We do like broadly built campaigns that include a little of everything over a campaign that focuses on one method. So just syndicating links via articles and press releases is simply not enough. I am basing this on personal experiences of successfully ranking websites on all Search Engines for extremely competitive terms and via my methodologies. In SEO many different approaches can work and each individual will have his or her own unique ideas.
One aspect that we will consider is numbers. Simply stated I hate numbers and trying to build based on numbers is wrong if not even ridiculous. To state 10 or 25 links per month is simply an amateur approach.
We build based on competitors and where they are and how they rank and more importantly "how long" they have ranked for. Sites with recent rankings are not always the best choices to model or base a campaign on as certain SEO methodologies used may not pass the test of time as the Search Engines more accurately access the linking and popularity systems used to rank the site.
We also base on the industry and what specific factors of links are being used by each individual industry. So view all competitors backlinks via Yahoo Site Explorer and see if you can target those. We also do not build in high volume, but rather for high quality which effects take time to show their best impact.
Types of links and the methodical thinking to use when considering each type of link.
Buying Links
Buying links for search ranking goes against Google's Webmaster Guidelines. It seems acceptable if you are a large company that has large advertising budgets in paid search and natural search.
The extent of Google's penalties on sites selling and buying links is unknown. Google has ruthlessly penalized sites for buying links in the past and in some cases never released the penalties or locked them into certain positions called the -30 penalty and -950 penalty on WebmasterWorld. It seems absurd to penalize for something you sell and acting even handed in penalties would be wise, but it is believed to not be the case.
Links are currently bought and sold daily through brokers and privately through site owners in blogrolls, sponsored link sections and even in content and blog posts.
Buying links still has powerful ranking effects for sites that are authority domains. If we look at terms like promotional products and notice that 6 or 7 of the top 10 ranking sites, they are all purchasing the same network link. Google ranks these 7 sites extremely well despite the known network of links they are on. This tells you, that if 6 or 7 of these sites are buying a link, that you have a 30% chance of getting to page one without buying the ad, or at least that is one common sense way to look at it.
Buying links can be based on competitors, keep in mind that if Google devalues the paid links for your competitor, they will also be degrading them for your site. So use with caution!
We like to believe that Google is just not-counting these links, but we fear that they tend to be heavy handed with link buying and are more inclined to penalize a site in specific industries, so again, be cautious and take it from the perspective that a Search Engine may ban you without warning and is more inclined to ban a site then forgive a site. With that kind of thinking, you should make the right decisions on link buying.
Remember Google is the only Search Engine that does not like link buying especially when it is obviously used for PageRank instead of traffic (that is becoming more difficult to determine). There is nothing morally wrong with buying a link for traffic and exposure, in fact I highly recommend those, and that is where I will tell you to ignore any Search Engines gripe with paid ads, and do what creates traffic!
BLOG : Better Listings On Google
Face it, Google is made up of bloggers and blog lovers, they place high importance on them in the current algorithm. Sidebar or BlogRoll links, blog posts which lend a content-based link are all heavily valued. Yahoo also likes blogs, but not to the extent of Google. MSN seems to be very even handed in its link value of blogs vs a more traditional site.
Blogs offer the Industry Popularity value, as they are generally written by related industry bloggers. They are also vastly becoming a portal for spam and copyright infringement. There is even the blackhat method of trying to duplicate-out competitors by reproducing the content of numerous blogs, these are usually the free blogs which, unfortunately, Google values them (might have something to do with the fact that they own them). A smart algorithm, would play down the free blog sites the same way it devalued the free webhosting sites like geocities.
Blog links are highly recommended and should be part of every SEO campaign. Some SEO firms are actually creating networks of blog sites for syndication - avoid these types of made for paid posting blogs and focus on ones that the writers care about and are not duplicated across hundreds of sites.
Web Directories
Many people will not like my opinion here, but I feel these are being devalued by Google because everyone and their mother owns a directory now. (Hey! Don't they also own a blog?)
Don't take this the wrong way there are a few good directories worth being listed in (future tutorial perhaps), but because there are literally millions of php directories popping up every day, and these directories all have heavy sponsorship on them, I feel that they are simply spammed-out (a pun on burnt out).
If you can weed out the few good web directories from the millions of spammy ones, then a link or two from these types of sites is really a plus.
Keep in mind, when only the home page has PR it's a takeover site, which means the history does not match the current focus of the site. Check the Archive.org's Wayback Time Machine to really tell what the site used to be. These types of sites by nature take longer to achieve rankings and generally have less value for a few months to even a few years if the site is not remarketed properly.
5. Searching the Engines for High-Quality Links
How to Increase Link Popularity and Improve Search Engine Ranking
If you want to improve search engine ranking of your web site, you need to find a large number of high quality links from other web sites. These are called inbound links. Gaining links from high ranking sites that point to yours will increase your link popularity in the search engines.
The most popular search engine Google, places great significance on the link popularity of your web site. In fact, you can even get listed in Google without submitting your site to them, by getting other sites to link to yours. Finding many high ranking sites that link to yours, will improve the search engine ranking of your own web site.
Four effective ways to increase link popularity
1. Get your site listed in the search engine directories - first submit your site to the human edited directories of ODP (Open Directory Project - dmoz.org) and Yahoo (yahoo.com). Getting listed in these directories will give your site a boost in link popularity and improve search engine ranking in other search engines.
However, this may take some time.
You can get listed much faster by getting links from niche specific directories. Find these directories by doing a search on the major search engines with the primary keywords of your web site.
2. Provide high quality content - people will naturally link to your site if you have what they want (i.e. articles, software, etc). This will save you a lot of time searching for quality links yourself.
Optimizing your content with well placed keywords, will improve your search engine ranking dramatically. Search engines love focused content.
Don't you love it when you immediately find what you are searching for?
One way of achieving this is by writing and publishing articles. You can include a link at the end of your article. When your article gets published, you will automatically have gained a link to your site.
3. Requesting links from other sites - request links from sites that ideally have a high search engine ranking. Start by including a link from your site to theirs. Include a paragraph describing what your link is about. This helps achieve a greater number of clickthroughs to your site.
Request that they do the same when linking to your web site. If you provide this for them (with some of your primary keywords included of course), and provide quality information, you will have a greater chance of gaining a high quality link.
4. Write a testimonial - write a favorable review of someone's product or web site. Include the benefits you received through visiting their site. If that person wishes to use your testimony on their site, make sure they include a link back to your web site.
These are some of the best strategies you should implement to increase link popularity of your web site. It will improve search engine ranking and also boost your web site traffic. |
