What is Link Popularity?

In the early 1990’s when the web was emerging, several sites having industry specific content were being added to the web each day. Web surfers on the other hand had very few tools to locate such sites, which they believed were out there but did not have a clue about their domain names or web address. With the birth of Yahoo in 1993, surfers were offered some relief. Yahoo classified each site it discovered in a neatly organized directory list and also embedded a search engine in its site to search for sites based on ‘keywords’ existing in its database.

Things seemed to work out fine before people started realizing the value of how they can ‘embed’ industry specific keywords in their Meta tags and other site code to show up higher in Yahoo search results. Over a period of time, search engine results started getting cluttered with sites that spammed their content with relevant keywords but had poor site content for the visitor. The very essence, credibility and importance of search engines was now being challenged to deal with how they could offer a more refined search output to their users.

With the launch of Google in the year 1998, some of these problems were addressed. Google pioneered an algorithm called ‘PageRank™’ which made it difficult for site owners to cheat. Simply put, PageRank is a value assigned to your site pages based on how many other sites linked to yours.

In Google’s own words –

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 more than the sheer volume of votes, or links a page receives; 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."

Important, high-quality sites receive a higher PageRank, which Google remembers each time it conducts a search. 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 all 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.

While the exact algorithm of each search engine is a closely guarded secret, search engines analysts believe that the search engine results (ranking) is some form of a multiplier factor of ‘Page Relevance’ and ‘PageRank’. Simply put, the formula would look something like –

Ranking = (Page Relevance) x (PageRank)

The PageRank logic made sense and the algorithm seemed impregnable at the hands of the webmasters. The search results of Google search have demonstrated high relevance and this is one of the main reasons for their resounding success. Most other major search engines have adopted this logic in their own algorithms in some form or the other, varying the importance they assign to this value in ranking sites in their search engine result pages.

While on the face of it, it may seem that there is little a Webmaster can do to leverage the power of PageRank, things are not as bad as they may seem. There are rewarding ways to build the link popularity of ones site and improve the PageRank. However, one needs to be careful in selection of link partners as linking to FFA (Free For All) network sites can actually get your site penalized.