Link Popularity & Page Rank

Link Popularity- Google Counts Inbound Links
As it relates to your overall promotion efforts, it is important that you understand what Link Popularity is, and how it affects your overall promotion efforts, specifically search engine rankings. Google, as of this writing, is generally regarded as the best relevancy-based search engine on the Internet. If you take into consideration the fact that Google provides the search results for not only Google, but also AOL , Netscape and several others, Google's search results have somewhere between a 70-80% reach on the Internet, depending on who you ask. The bottom line is that if you come up number one for a particular keyword phrase in Google, you are also number one on all the search engines for which Google provides search results. Understanding what matters to Google for effective listings is important.

Google (and other relevancysearch engines increasingly) uses as a factor in determining the relevancy of a particular web page to a particular keyword a concept they call "Link Popularity". Google counts the number of other websites on the Internet that link to your site. (Note: Google must be indexing those other sites in order to count their link to you. If a particular site linking to you is not indexed by Google, it does not benefit your link popularity, but it is still a link that can send you traffic; so don't panic.) The more sites that link to yours, the higher your link popularity and thus the higher you go in Google's search engine results. Consider too, that link popularity is certainly not the only factor Google considers by a long shot. Make sure you learn more about relevancy search engine optimization.

Improving your link popularity should be a permanent part of your marketing efforts. Consider however, that if you are already doing the other important things to promote your site, your link popularity will grow automatically. They are all intertwined. You should review the Link Trading, Live Web Directories, Vertical Portals, and Strategic Linking tutorials for specifics on how to get other websites to link to yours.

Page Rank- Not All Links Are Created Equal
Google does not rank links from all websites equally. Google gives more weight to links from some websites than from others. Google calls this score "Page Rank", and Google assigns every website on the Internet their own Page Rank. The PR score is from 0 to 10. Google reserves the highest ranks for what they deem the most important sites on the Web. For example Yahoo has a PR of 10, and the Open Directory Project has a PR of 9. Most other web directories on the web have ranks of 7 and higher. Google considers these links among the most highly valued when calculating your link popularity, and thus these websites have the highest "Page Rank". Getting other websites with high PR to link to you is critical to improving your own site's PR. Ultimately for a commercial website a PR of 6 is about as good as you could ever hope to get, with a PR of at least 5 being your minimum goal. When you achieve a PR of 5 you will find that many other websites begin to request link trades from you more often, because they value a link from you. The bottom line is that your own PR affects a lot of your overall marketing and site promotion. If and when you achieve a PR of 5 or 6, your search engine rankings will go up and you will be able to more easily trade links.

Other websites vary widely in terms of how much Google values them with respect to link popularity. Vertical portals are typically more highly valued than other simple websites. Free hosted sites, are ranked lower than paid hosted sites. Free-For-All link pages receive zero credit. Link Farms who link to you will actually penalize your link popularity, because they are a blatant attempt to hijack Google's link popularity algorithms.

Determining Page Rank
You must keep track of your own Page Rank, and it is illuminating to watch what Google's Page Rank Score is for various websites, there are two ways of determining this, listed in order of preference.

Download and Install Google's Toolbar at http://toolbar.google.com. Once this is installed, you will be able to determine the page rank of every website you visit, including your own. The page rank is displayed with a green rank bar roughly in the middle of the Google Toolbar. The more green you see, the higher the rank. By mousing over the green rank bar, you can see the actual numerical designation, for example 5/10.


Go to Google's Live Directory (which is a mirror of the Open Directory Project) at http://directory.google.com. All websites listed in this directory display Google's Page Rank, as the green bar to the left of each listing. The more green you see, the higher the page rank. Keep in mind that only a small percentage of websites on the Internet are listed here.
Checking Your Link Popularity
You can easily check to see which websites (indexed by Google) are linking to your website. Simply go to Google and do a search for "link: yourdomain.com" for example if you search for "link: 10kplus.com" you will learn that what and see how the top 500 websites (as of this writing) linking together, and they are all listed in standard Google search results format. Again there may be more than that, but Google doesn't count them if they are not indexed by Google in the first place.

Your Linking Strategy
Track your own Page Rank, and keep promoting your site until you achieve a rank of at least 5. In order to accomplish this, you will need to do a thorough job of getting listed in as many Web Directories as possible (note that without a link from Yahoo and the ODP it may be impossible to achieve a PR of 5). In addition to the web directories, make sure you find and submit to as many vertical portals as possible. Then trade links like crazy. You should be able to achieve a PR of 5 pretty quickly. Beware that you don't let the Page Rank make you too choosy. If there is any green showing at all with a potential link trade partner, it is net benefit to you. Your strategy should still be to get links pointing to your site from every good and relevant source. Again, check and Strategic plan your trading and how your site is setup for trading and keep building links to generate traffic.