Tweet

Why link popularity is the top factor in top search engine rankings

Written by: Michael Fleischner

Article Overview: Developing links to your website is key for top search engine placement. Increase your ranking with a strong link building program.

Why link popularity is the top factor in top search engine rankings

The Value of Links versus Content
It used to be said that content is king. And while content is an important ingredient in developing a commercially successful website, link popularity is proving to be the deciding factor on what will or will not rank well, especially on Google. Off page criteria has grown into the primary ranking factor in the major search engines.

Link popularity analysis makes Google famous
The biggest feature that sets Google apart from their search engine competition was PageRank. Most search engines at the time looked at on-page factors to analyze what a web page was about. On-page factors are essentially how a website reads and the words contained therein. There was no verification from other parties.

What Google did was analyze what other websites were saying about a particular
web page by analyzing incoming links to a website. Google’s algorithm ranks websites primarily on:
1. The volume of incoming links to a webpage.
2. The quality of the incoming links to a webpage.
3. The anchor text (link text) of the incoming link to your webpage.

Volume of Links
The more links pointing to a website, the more important it is assumed to be. This is part of what goes into the mix of calculating PageRank.

A website like Yahoo is judged to be important because thousands of websites around the web are pointing to it. And if an important website links to your website, then your website is also judged to be important, which brings us to the aspect of quality.


Quality of Links
All incoming links are not the same. A link from Yahoo is judged to be more authoritative than a link from a poorly linked website. A link from a website that has a high number of naturally occurring inbound links and is themed the same as your website is a high quality link.
The web is divided by “neighborhoods” relative to their theme as well as quality. Google makes reference to “bad neighborhoods” and it’s important to stay out of them. Free for all (FFA) link exchanges are an example of a low quality link neighborhood.

Anchor Text
Since people naturally use descriptive text when linking to other websites, Google analyzes anchor text. It used to be enough to attain a handful of high PageRank links with relevant anchor text in order to rank well, but now it is important to achieve links from a wide variety of websites with descriptive anchor text. As search engine space becomes more competitive it will be imperative to secure a high volume of high quality incoming links.

How Links Help Your Website
The citation analysis model allows the web community to, in essence, vote for the top results. The problem is that if the web community cannot see your website (it currently does not rank well on the search engines), it’s never going to vote on it.

Another flaw is that while a natural growth of links is possible with a website that is creating ideas, such as a blog, this does not happen naturally with most commercial websites. Commercial websites are obligated to create content that inspires linking and take a proactive stance toward developing inbound links.

With the right content, tools, and resources, more sites will provide one-way links. The result is higher search engine placements and increased traffic to your site.

Related Articles
  Dofollow Blog Comments Increasing SERPS for Your SEO Campaign
  Building Backlinks Is Definitely The Key If You'd Like Regular Site Visitors
  For Good SEO You Must Go Back To Basics
  5 Key ingredients of Increasing Search Engine Rankings
  Link Building to Increase Search Engine Rankings

Article Tags: anchor text, Google, PageRank, PageRank, search engine, search engine, search engines, search engines, Yahoo



Related Forum Posts
Re: Specific Strategies To Raise PR Levels? - After re-reading through the posts in this thread it seems to me like there might be a little confusion as to what Page Rank (PR) really is. For those who don't know... PR is a number between 1 and 10 that Google assigns to a web page based on it's importance. With 10 being the highest and most important. It's mainly determined by the number and quality of inbound links to the web page but there are other factors as well. It is NOT the ranking your site has in the Google search engine or any other search engine. If you are ranked #3 on google for "home business" that does not mean you have a PR of 3. They are completely separate things. Furthermore, PR does not determine how high a site ranks in the search engines. It's possible and very common for a site with a low PR to outrank and site with a higher PR for the same keyword phrase. If you want to raise your PR then you need more backlinks. Higher PR backlinks will pass more link juice to you and help raise it much easier. On that same note, if you want to increase your search engine rankings for a particular keyword then you also need more backlinks with the keyword you are targeting as the anchor text. When it comes to that, Page Rank and Search Engine Ranking Positions are very similar but that is it. People often think that they need high PR to get good search engine rankings and it is not true. They also tend to think that just because a site has high PR then it is better than a site with lower PR, that is also not always the case. One final thing about this is that the PR you see on your Google Toolbar for a web page only updates a few times per year and is not necessarily the actual PR for that page. The actual PR is stored at Google and is updated constanty, and is not shown to the public. Only they know what it really is. I hope that clears up some common misconceptions about Google Page Rank (PR).
Re: Twitter, Social Networking: What's Your method? - [quote:3jvh79yz]From my experience, social networking traffic (Twitter included) also converts at a far lower rate than search engine traffic. People who find you via a search engine are looking for answers to a particular problem and are more likely to buy your product / service. Twitter and other social networking visitors can help your traffic numbers but they usually come out of general interest and don't end up buying what you're selling. I haven't seen a website owner yet say they prefer social media traffic over search engine.[/quote:3jvh79yz] I couldn't agree more! I've been trying to drive this point into people's heads on my blogs and various forums for at least a year now. Yes, you can get a lot of traffic from social sites but if it doesn't make you any money (or very little) then what's the point?! You can use the same time you spend on social sites building up your rankings in search engines to get traffic that actually converts into money!
Re: Link Building Tactics - [quote="jeremywadford":1fklbtpr]To decrease spam lots of sites make certain links no-follow. What that means is visitors can still click on them and follow them to your site, BUT bots cannot. So while you may get a few extra visitors, the links themselves will not be counted by search engine like google.[/quote:1fklbtpr][quote="Evan":1fklbtpr]Just a point of clarification on Jeremy's post here. Google robots will follow a no-follow link but it won't recognize any Page Rank being passed through that link.[/quote:1fklbtpr] Evan, I'm still a bit confused. The google bots will follow the link...but they don't give any "link juice" to your site (if you were the one who posted the link), correct? Or something like that? On my blog/website, comment links are all nofollows. I did a bit of research on this, and I'm still not quite sure, but the majority opinion seems to be, as a webmaster, to choose no-follow links for comments as a deterrent for spam. I've actually had more than a few people post a comment and *threaten* to not post again if I don't change my links to remove the nofollow. To them, I said good-riddance...if you are only posting on my blog to get better search engine rankings, then you're missing the point. If you have something valuable to contribute, then I welcome that, and the community on my site will value your comment and click thru. As a commenter on other's blogs, what I really want is people to be informed and then intrigued to find out more, and click on my link. I don't really care if I get "link juice" from it (perhaps I should, but I don't.)
Re: Hello friends!!!! - [quote="davisdchapman":2xkfc5d6]I am new to this forum.I think you will help me put all the information search engine optimization I'm still learning, to start my career SEO.So hello all .. I think I want to use PHP realted freelancers fields, but also search engine optimization, search engine optimization, I think there is a vast area freelancing.That is why I am on the track, I hope I will achieve my goal, if I can learn all of the search engine optimization process, I feel that this site especially for this purpose for me.[/quote:2xkfc5d6] Hello David, Welcome and thank you for telling us a little about yourself and your aspirations. As GT has rightly said, if you take a little while to check out all the resources here and the various topics you will find a lot of answers to many questions, not just SEO, regards, Mal.
Re: SEO... - Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of civilizing the volume or quality of traffic to a web site from search engines via "natural" search results. Typically, the earlier a site appears in the search results list, the more visitors it will receive from the search engine. SEO may target different kinds of search, including image search, local search, and industry-specific vertical searchengines. This gives a web site web presence.


Share this article with your friends. Fund someone's dream.

Leave a comment below or share on the left and you'll help support entrepreneurs in Africa through our partnership with Kiva. Over $50,000 raised and counting - Please keep sharing! Learn more.

Tweet

Newsletter

Get advice & tips from famous business
owners, new articles by entrepreneur
experts, my latest website updates, &
special sneak peaks at what's to come!

Name:
Email:

Popular Articles

What is Discretionary Cash Flow

What If You Had a 100% Success Rate?

The Death of the Sales Magazine

Suggestions

Email us your ideas on how to make our
website more valuable! Thank you Sharon
from Toronto Salsa Lessons / Classes for
your suggestions to make the newsletter
look like the website and profile younger
entrepreneurs like Jennifer Lopez.