Unhealthy Rankings? Get a Link Popularity Check
Link Popularity is by far one of the most decisive factors in determining the rankings of a website in major Search Engines. Ever since Larry Page and Sergey Brin discovered the importance of hyperlinks as a relative measure of popularity of a website, many other search engines have followed suite. The Page Rank algorithm, which ranks the pages based on the quality and quantity of incoming links, has made Google the king of all search engines.
What is Link Popularity?
Link popularity of a webpage, is simply the number of links pointing to that particular page from other websites. Each link is considered as a ‘Vote’ to that webpage leveraging the democratic nature of Internet. It is not only the sheer number of links pointing to your webpage that counts, but also the quality of these back-links. Links from websites with high link popularity are considered more important than links from low link popularity websites.
PageRank Algorithm
Google’s PageRank algorithm confers, each webpage in its index, a value from 0 to 10 based on the number of inbound links. Rather than giving precise back links count, it assigns a page rank score to a webpage. The number of inbound links required increases exponentially as we move from low PageRank to higher. In fact, the toolbar PageRank signifies the probability that a person surfing randomly through hyperlinks will reach the webpage under consideration. The higher the number of incoming links from related websites, the more chances a user has of finding that webpage.
Have a Link Popularity Check
Just as you don’t forget to get a yearly check up from your doctor, get a thorough link popularity check of your website done frequently to maintain healthy rankings in Search Engines. There are many tools available online which allow you to check the number of back-links. Yahoo provides a best link popularity checking tool in the form of Site Explorer which not only allows you to check link popularity of the domain, but also link popularity of a single page. Some others like Backlinkwatch.com also lets you see the anchor text used in each back-link. Checking each of the linking pages is a tiresome task but it’s worth trying. Keep an eye on penalized or ‘Bad Neighborhood’ websites linking to you because too many of these incoming links can hurt your link profile.
Is Content still the King?
Of course, it is. Good content is a must for every successful website. But apart from this, good content also acts as bait for attracting high quality one-way links. It’s always better to have a website with keyword rich content which not only looks enticing to visitors but search engines as well. People might want link to this content and, in process, provide you many natural links which can work wonders for your business.
Ever since the focus has shifted from on-page factors which webmasters can easily manipulate and exploit, link popularity has emerged as most the important ranking factor among all the major search engines. Keep a link popularity check on your website in order to ensure good organic results and consistent flow of traffic to your website.
