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Link_Popularity_ _fact_fiction_and_your_ranking
| Link Popularity - fact, fiction and your ranking
Link popularity is one of the single most influential factors
for determining how well a web site will perform in search
engine rankings. A web site's link popularity is computed from
the number and more importantly, the quality of links pointing
to a web site.
Link Popularity history:
To gain a better understanding of link popularity it is useful
to know why it became so crucial for search engine rankings. In
the past a web page's ranking was determined, amongst other
factors, by the number of keyword occurences within 'on-page'
elements i.e. in page text, META tags, title tag. When web
developers learned that they could trick a search engine to
return their web pages by cramming keywords into their pages the
search engines had to get a bit smarter. They were using
'on-page' elements to determine relevance so it was only natural
that they would look to elements out of direct control of the
web page creator i.e. 'off-page' elements. Search engines made
the assumption that the greater the number of links from other
sites pointing to a web site, the more popular the web site is
and therefore a more quality resource. This worked nicely in
theory but in practice it was also to be abused.
Web site owners figured out many ways to get links pointing to
their web sites one example of which was through the use of link
farms, pages the contained nothing more than a collection of
links, Quantity of links was being abused so the search engines
made use of the old saying "quality not quantity" and began to
assign a quality factor to each of the links pointing to a web
site. Now web sites that had a higher number of high quality
links were looked upon favourably by the search engines.
Building link popularity became a science in itself and today is
still the most time-consuming and frustrating activity for a
search engine optimizer.
Main classes of links:
Note: In the following examples SiteA is our web site and SiteB
is an outside site i.e. a web site under a different domain name
than SiteA.
Inbound links: Inbound links to a web site are links that
originate from an outside web site . An example would be a link
on SiteB pointing into a page on SiteA. SiteA
SiteB
There are two further classifications of links:
Reciprocal links: An example of a reciprocal link is when SiteA
links to SiteB AND SiteB links to SiteA, the link is
reciprocated by both parties. SiteA -----> SiteB AND SiteA
SiteB OR SiteA
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