Link popularity -
A measure of the authority of a Website or page based upon the number and authority of pages that
link to it ("Backlinks").
Link popularity is a major determinant of authority and
Google PageRank.
More links to your Web pages are going to boost the positioning of that page in search engines, especially in Google.
The limiting case is a page that has no pages link to it. It cannot be found by the search engines at all because there
is no way for them to reach that page. Google will often require that a page have two or more external links (off
site) before it will link to it.
The use of link popularity for search engine positioning was pioneered by Larry Page and Sergey Brin in the
Google search engine, and it is
explained in the article: The PageRank Citation Ranking: Bringing Order to the Web.
As the title implies, the idea is to rate the pages according to how many "citations" they get, similar to scientific
journal articles, and to the importance of the sources giving them those citations or backlinks.
Link Popularity "Gotchas"
While "more links" is generally better for search engine positioning, there are some "gotchas." Links that come from
poor sources such as "Link farms" (pages and sites made for the sole purpose of linking to other sites with no review of
quality) can downgrade the importance of your site. Links that have
anchor text that is unrelated to the content of
the page, may boost the PageRank of that page, but they won't be as much help in getting the page a top position
for a particular keyword. For example, suppose your firm is called the acme company and has many links to "Acme." Acme
makes Widgets. If the text in the links doesn't have the word "Widgets" in it, or in the title attribute of the link,
the links may not help get a top position in results for queries for [widgets].
Link Popularity and Reciprocal Links
One way of increasing link popularity is to exchange links with other Websites. Since this can be viewed as an
attempt to influence search engine results, supposedly, search engines downgrade reciprocal links in favor of one way links, because reciprocal links are
evidence of collusion or link exchanges This might be true in some cases, but it is a somewhat dubious assertion. There
is no reason a priori to believe that mutual links are the result of collusion. Environmental groups may provide links
to other environmental groups for example, and information sites may exchange links with other information site. From
the computational point of view, detecting and calculating reciprocal versus non-reciprocal links can be somewhat time
consuming. Consider the case of possible links between a page in wikipedia.org and a page in cnn.com, and a
"reciprocated" link from a different page in cnn.com and wikipedia.org. Even assuming that there is collusion between
the two sites, and that the search for reciprocity is meaningful, wikipedia and CNN each have over 13 million pages registered in
Google. Each page may have numerous links and each site has a huge number of backlinks.
In order to downgrade reciprocity, the search engine would need to keep track of the destinations of links from every
page and query the entire database for each link to Wikipedia to determine if CNN or another large site like Yahoo
linked back to any page in Wikipedia. It might not be the most useful and efficient way to employ computation time.
Ami Isseroff
October 2, 2008
Note - Definitions of Search Engine
Optimization terms are based on inferences from common usage and definitions given by other sources. Conclusions about
search engine behavior are based on understanding of the behavior of the most popular search engines. Both are subject
to error or may change. Search engine company management may define or use a term or set or change any policy in any way
they see fit, and may make these definitions and specifications public or not. These decisions and definitions are
beyond our control. Notice: Copyright
All materials are copyright 2008 by Ami Isseroff. All rights reserved. These pages may not be reproduced in any
form in electronic or printed media without express written permission from the author.
SEO Glossary
