Because of the Giant called Googles interest in link exchanging it has now become more and more important that webmasters assure themselves of a sound Link Popularity strategy.
Link popularity is an off-page criteria that the Search Engines are using more and
more. Why is this? Because Lord Google made it important. Although inter-related, there are two main purposes for in-pointing links as far as the Search Engines are concerned:
1) To establish the credibility of the linked site. An in-pointing link from a
quality, related site tells the Search Engines that another Webmaster thinks highly
enough of your site to link to it. In other words, the link counts as a vote of
confidence. The more highly the Search Engines regard the site that provides the
link, the more powerful that vote becomes.
Why should I care you ask. Because its important just trust me. No no Im just kidding. The reason is because until your site has established some link popularity, you may find yourself being dropped periodically from the various Search Engine databases. Sure, youll get re-spidered and ranked, but the process is a frustrating one. Moreover, for those search engines you cant submit to, their crawlers must find and rank you independently. Unless they happen to find you by following a link from a site already on their radar, it may be a long time before you make it into their respective indices. In addition many people say that Google assigns you a rookie status when you are a new site and therefore only time will say when the behemoth notices you.
So quality links not only increase the chance of getting listed by Search Engines that do not offer a submission service, they ensure your site will stick in the databases of the ones that do.
Did you notice my careful use of the word QUALITY links? The only links that matter to you are links from quality sites with themes related to your business. For example, having a link from a mortgage site is a good thing if you have a real estate or financing site, but if you have a link from a gambling site this is not only irrelevant but might actually penalise you with Engines like Google. In order words dont just link to link make sure your links are credible like everything else in your business should be.
Ok Im finally at:
2) As an off-page ranking criteria. Link popularity is an off-page ranking criteria
that the Search Engines are using more and more. It is not the dominant weighting
factor for rankings, of course. Content on a page will always be the most important.
In fact, although establishing link popularity for the sake of improving your rankings is
still worth working on, you shouldnt lose any sleep about it. Why?
Because most sites do not have many links to them at all. If all sites had hundreds of
incoming links, link popularity would be weighted more heavily in the engines ranking
algorithms. But most sites just do not have that many incoming links -- if you
weighted linking too heavily, youd make 99% of the Net disappear. |
