The majority of the major search engines use link popularity as an important criteria in ranking the relevancy of a web site. As search engines have become more sophisticated, so too has link popularity. Link popularity is simply a way of representing the number of links from other web sites that point to your web site.



This link building, or link popularity, strategy has gained immense success due to the crawling nature of most search engines. Spiders crawl from link to link and store pages into their database. Link popularity is generally gained through reciprocal linking. Other web sites would usually point to your web site only if you have a link to their web site from yours.

A few years ago, the number of web sites linking to your site gauged link popularity; little emphasis was placed on the "content relevancy" of the linking site. In an effort to gain more link popularity, "link farms" began sprouting up across the web. For a nominal fee, a web site owner could join link farms and enjoy increased link popularity overnight.

Search engines caught onto this tactic and created better tools for detecting legitimate links. Web sites that have links from web sites with "similar" or "relevant" content score higher, thus earn better placement in search engines.

Please, avoid joining "link farms"; some search engines consider them a form of Spam and you may have your web site penalised for keeping "bad company".

It is more important than ever to develop a solid "link-popularity" strategy. One excellent, although time consuming, method is to simply make contact with web sites that are complimentary to your site requesting a link exchange.

When making a reciprocal link request it is critical that you demonstrate that you have actually visited their site. And, don't simply rely upon email, I have achieved great success with a quick 'phone call or by sending a letter via snail mail.

Link analysis is somewhat different than measuring link popularity. While link popularity is generally used to measure the number of pages that link to a particular site, link analysis will go beyond this and analyse the popularity of the pages that link to your pages.

In a way link analysis is a chain analysis system that accords weighting to every page that links to the target site, with weights determined by the popularity of those pages. Search engines use link analysis in their page-ranking algorithm. Search engines also try to determine the context of those links, in other words, how closely those links relate to the search string.

For example if the search string was "toys", and if there were links from other sites that either had the word toys within the link or in close proximity of the link, the ranking algorithm determines that this a higher priority link and ranks the page, that this is linked to, higher.