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Link popularity is a term much talked about but little understood in terms of its relevance and importance. It's not easy locating quality sites related to but not competing with yours who are willing to give up valuable real estate for your link. It takes solid research, smooth negotiating skills, and a large investment of time to develop a base of reputable, relevant link partners that will make the search bots take notice of your website.

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Major search engines consider link popularity as one of the key factors in ranking a website. At least one major engine even claims they won't index sites that don't have at least one link pointing to them from another site. Many online marketing specialists believe that link popularity is simply obtaining as many links as possible. However, the quality of the link holds more weight than the quantity of links. You will get better results in the search engines if you have link popularity from sites that have considerable traffic.

Obtaining links from other web sites is not enough to obtain long-term results on both the search engines and directories. People have to actually click on those links to your web site and browse your web site. More importantly they need to return to your web site when they see the quality content, products, and/or services that you offer, i.e. the usability of your web site.

As the importance of linking grew people began to look for short-cuts to link popularity. There's a right and a wrong way to create backlinks, and short-cuts to link popularity can cause severe trouble for a website to be ranked. One solid example of this type of short-cut is the use of link farms that provide hundreds of irrelevant links. Link farm is a network of sites that link to other sites for the sole purpose of increasing their link popularity. Your website gets hundreds of links to your site from all unrelated sites and in return, you must link to hundreds of other unrelated sites. Google terms it as spamming and removes sites from its index related with link farms.

Therefore link popularity should be developed the right way and in the right direction. Your website should link to information that interests your visitors and increase their knowledge in topics related to your business. Many webmasters ignore this very rewarding process because of shortage of time because they just don't have the time. Having another site linked to yours is almost vital when it comes to getting your site indexed.

A growing number of search engines use link popularity in their ranking algorithms. Google uses it as its most important factor in ranking sites. HotBot, AltaVista, MSN, Inktomi, and others also use link popularity in their formulas. Eventually every major engine will use link popularity, so developing and maintaining it are essential to your search engine placement.

Link popularity can do a lot for your site. Not only will many search engines rank you higher, but links from other sites will also drive more traffic to you. Link popularity is much more than a measure of how many links point to a site. Search engines use far more sophisticated formulas to gauge how popular sites are. In general, however, link popularity is measured by the following factors:

1. Number of Links - The more, the better. Although lots of irrelevant links are less effective than a few relevant ones, they're better than nothing. Inktomi, a company that provides search results to engines like HotBot, still values the number of links more than anything else.

2. Link text - The text used to describe a link can also affect your rankings. These three links all point to the same URL but use different text:

Yourwebsite.com

Your Keywords

Click here

Search engines' spiders figure that any words other sites use to describe your site are particularly relevant. So, if lots of sites linking to you use keywords in their link text, search engines will boost your ranking for those keywords.

Also make sure that they are NOT FFA links, Guestbook Links, Link Farms...100% genuine HTML links. NO javascript type links, No hidden links. Link popularity is important because it is a major factor in high GoogleT rankings. Link popularity will continue to be an essential factor in top search engine rankings for the foreseeable future. has brought in a lot of changes but what I feel is that there never was a single factor driving rankings in the SERPS and Search Engine Algorithms change with the pace of time to tackle Search Engine Spamming issues and was one of those updates.