Google is by far the most important search engine on the net. To
rise to the top of their search engine, you need to improve your
link popularity and you need to understand how they measure your
link popularity (over 50% of all search engine traffic comes
from Google, and if you can rise to the top, you will likely
rise to the top of all the other search engines as well).
Link popularity is defined as the number of sites that are
linking to your site. Some websites have thousands or even
millions of sites linking to them, while others might have only
a few. The search engines use the number of inbound links your
site has as a measure of how important your site is, which
translates into your search engine ranking.
The actual number of links to your site is not the only variable
used to calculate your link popularity. The search engines also
examine the relevance of the links to the subject matter of your
site. For example, if a website that sells vitamins has 4,000
inbound links, but the source of most of the links are websites
that have nothing to do with vitamins, then the algorithm that
search engines use to determine link popularity will take that
into account, and the link popularity score will not be very
good.
It is possible for a website with a relatively small number of
quality inbound links to be ranked higher than a site with a
bunch of irrelevant or insignificant links. If I have a website
that offers quotes for auto insurance, and I have 800 quality
inbound links, then I might receive a much higher search engine
ranking than another mortgage site that has 3,000 links that
stem from link farms or Free For All (FFA) pages.
If you try to acquire inbound links by using link farms or FFA
pages, not only will it hurt your search engine ranking, but you
might get permanently removed from the search engine listings.
Link farms are sites where you can instantly exchange links
with all the sites listed in that directory. FFA pages are
pointless link directories. The search engines usually discount
any links that come from either of these sources.
Now that we understand what link popularity is and how it works,
we need to look specifically at how Google measures it. They use
a number of variables in their algorithm to calculate your
overall link score. The higher your score, the higher you will
be ranked in the search listings.
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One factor that Google uses in their algorithm, obviously, is
the total number of sites linking to you. The more links you
have, the higher your score will be. However, their algorithm is
a little more complicated than that, and it is possible for a
website with fewer links to be ranked higher than a website that
has more links.
The reason for this is because Google also measures the quality
of your links. If your website is about vitamins, and the site
linking to you is a video game site, then that is not considered
a quality link. The link still helps your score, but the link
would help your score much more if it were from a website whose
subject matter is the same as yours.
Also, Google gives a higher score to a link if it comes from a
page that has actual content that relates to your keywords. For
example, if your site is about jewelry, and another jewelry
website has posted a link to your site on their links page, that
link is not as valuable as a link to your site coming from a
blog or a message board where a lot of information about jewelry
is being written or discussed.
Also, they give an even higher score to a link if it contains
anchor text that matches one of the keywords that describes your
site. For example, if I have a site that sells lawnmowers, and a
blog about lawnmowers has posted a link to my site, it helps my
score even more if the link text (also known as anchor text) is
LAWNMOWERS. To learn more about anchor text, go to a search
engine and look up ANCHOR TEXT and you will be able to learn
about it.
Another factor used by Google to score your link popularity is
the diversity of keywords contained on sites linking to you. For
example, if you have a site that sells handbags, and all the
links to your site are from other sites that contain nothing but
the keyword HANDBAGS, Google considers that to be abnormal. To
get a higher score, you need to have links coming from sites
that contain a variety of keywords related to handbags, such as
BUY HANDBAGS, LEATHER HANDBAGS, etc.
It is difficult to increase your link popularity, but now that
you understand how your score is calculated, you can devise a
plan to improve your score. You might want to consider posting
to forums and blogs that contain information that is related to
your site, and when you post, include a link to your site.
About The Author
Jim Pretin is the owner of Forms4Free.com, a service that helps programmers make an HTML form.
