Quick Introduction to Link Popularity
If you are new to Web site promotion, you might not have heard
of link popularity before, but in some respects, it's the single
most important factor for good ranking in search engines. Before
covering link popularity, a brief overview of how search engines
operate is in order.
Because of the vast number of files and documents on the Web,
there is an inherent need for some method of indexing and
searching for documents. Search engines and directories fill
this need to varying degrees of success. Pure search engines
differ from directories in that they do not use human editors to
add to their directories; they use software to "crawl" through
links in documents to find other documents to add to their
indexes. Historically, these engines based the ranking of
individual documents on factors such as keyword placement (where
a keyword appears on a page), keyword density (how many times a
keyword appears on a page), and the use of special HTML tags
known as META tags. Because these factors were easily
manipulated by Webmasters, a high ranking could often be
achieved for pages of little or no value. New methods of ranking
pages were needed to achieve better results.
Then along came click tracking and link popularity. Click
tracking is another topic in its own right, so that won't be
covered right now, but the basis of link popularity can be
explained in one sentence: The more sites that provide quality
links to yours, the better. It's not really that simple, because
there are different kinds of links and linking methods that
affect ranking, but for an introductory article, it'll do just
fine.
Basically, the algorithms, or rules, that the search engines use
favor those sites that have a large number of quality links
pointing toward them. You can think of it as a popularity
contest. Page A has more links pointing toward it, so therefore
it must be a more useful page than page B, which has no links
pointing toward it. Because of this, building links with other
sites is simply one of the most effective forms of promotion for
your site.