Link Popularity and the Importance in Page Ranking

There are many different factors which contribute to the effectiveness of link building. While some people may think it's the number of links you have to your site that will help to improve your rankings in the search engine results pages, this is not always the case. There are many things that need to be considered before you have your site's link added to another site. Here are some of the most important:

Trusted Domains

If you link to a domain that is trusted by Google and the page is relevant, this will pass on link juice. However, even if a web page is less relevant but with a powerful domain, the links will still be counted.

If you can get a link from a website that is in your niche community, this will help with the Topic Sensitive Page Rank. To get good ranking here, you'll need to establish links from a niche website in a specific topical community. This is even effective if you can link to a new website in your niche community. Don't overlook these sites just because they are new.

Page Rank

Google has recently changed the algorithms used to give page rank. This is due to the manipulation by many websites of the page ranking system. While page rank is important, don't bypass the chance to link with pages that have a high PR and are only somewhat relevant.

Link Popularity

While page rank is a way to measure link popularity, this can be different for two websites. If a PR6 website has 1000 links and another with the same page rank has 7000, the one that has 7000 links is more valuable to link to.

You simply cannot measure the link popularity with the toolbar PR. Link analysis must be implemented as well. There are many free tools available that can be used to determine the number of links a website has. However, it is possible that Google may not count half of those links shown on these tools, so use this as a relative measure for link building. By consistently analyzing the links on the pages your site is linked to, you will soon see if a pattern emerges.

Link Popularity on Topic-Related Websites

It's becoming increasingly difficult to rank in the SERP's if you don't have links to sites that are in your topical community. One way to distinguish between websites is to see if there are links of the same topic to other websites. This is a good indicator that the website is related to the topic of your webpage or site.

In Closing

Building links to websites that are in your topic community is the best way to work on raising your ranking in the SERP's. Choose sites that are reputable and trusted. Realize that increasing your ranking will not happen overnight, but if you practice “white hat” techniques, you will see results. As always, avoid buying links or using link farms to try and improve your ranking.