Link Popularity and Optimisation

Link popularity is becoming increasingly important for a well optimised website. In the early days of search engine technology, search engines did not have to incorporate sophisticated search techniques. Search results would be formed on the basis of key word frequency. As more websites launched, the increased competition saw the birth of the "search engine spammer".

As people began to develop underhand techniques to influence the search engine rankings, the major search engines started to fight back and add new criteria to their indexing of websites. The aim of link popularity is to give sites with multiple inbound links a boost over a website that has similar content, but with little or no inbound links.

One of the theories that the search engines work to is, if other websites are prepared to link to a website, then that website content must be of a higher value than a site without any inbound links.

The calculation of link popularity has evolved to stay one step ahead of the spammers. Link popularity now takes other factors into the equation such as how relevant an incoming link is (is it coming from a site with a similar topic). Google has by far the most effective link popularity check, which it calls "PageRank".