We all know that links are the holy grail in search engine rankings. Google bases their page rank to a large degree on link popularity. Link popularity measures the popularity of a particular website on the basis of which and how many websites link to a specific site.
You can easily check to see which websites (indexed by Google) link to your website. When you perform a search, using “links:domainname.com”, Google will tell you exactly how many and which sites are linking to yours. This does not tell you the entire story, though. The number of links is certainly important, but there is much more to link building than number of links.
Let’s take a look at the 7 most important factors that determine link popularity:
- Link Quality. It is very important that you realize that the quality of the site that is linking to you is much more important than the number of sites linking to yours. In other words if you have the choice between targeting a few high PR links or a large number of low PR links, you are probably better off getting links from high PR sites. ??Having said that, I do have to point out that having no links point to your site at all is not good for your PR. Google does not rank your site down for low PR sites. In other words, it does not hurt you to have links from sites with little link authority. When your site is brand new it is a great strategy to go for easy to get, low PR links.
- Link Age. The freshness of the link matters also. A web page that gets a few new links from time to time is considered more authoritative than a site that hasn’t had a new link coming to it in months. This should make you realize that consistency in link building is crucial.
- Anchor Text (the words that make up the link). How sites link to yours is part of the link popularity equation. Having your keywords as part of the anchor text is more powerful than having your URL as the anchor text. Unfortunately, you have no control over how others link to your site.
- Link Relevance. It is oftentimes stated that links from sites that are relevant to yours would be favored by the search engines. I don’t believe that this is true. Sites with the same PR carry the same weight towards your link popularity. In other words if your website is about gardening, but you are reading an article about health care reform, the comment that you leave on that page can count just as much as the comment about garden tools on a site with equal PR. The reason this mistake is made frequently is because it is assumed that if you leave a comment on a non related site, your anchor text is going to be non-related also. But as long as your anchor text is relevant to the topic of your site, your back link counts the same, regardless of the topic on the site where you are placing your comment.
- Link Diversity. The source of your link partner matters also. Receiving a few links from international, .org, .edu and similar sites show search engines that your site is more appealing than a similar site with only domestic .com links.
- Linking Out. If you have some outbound links to reliable, high quality, pages, the search engines assume that you are genuinely interested in the experience of the visitor. For that reason linking to sites like wikipedia, .gov, .edu and .org sites, will help establish your authority and your link popularity.
- Reciprocal links. In recent years that importance of reciprocal linking has diminished. in fact, if the other site is not relevant to your topic reciprocal linking will hurt you, not help you. If a site is not relevant to yours, do NOT trade links, regardless of PR and/or Alexa score. These days there are many ways to get one-way links. Social bookmarking being one of them.
From the above it should be clear to you, that social bookmarking is a great way to build link popularity. Social bookmarking sites, in general, have a high page rank. The links are relevant and one-way. Because of the large number of social bookmarking sites, you could even consider using different ones at different times, to change it up even more.
