Link Popularity refers to the number of outbound links connected to your website, or the number of related websites that link back to yours as an important resource. The more relevant sites that link to yours, naturally, the higher your site's popularity in that particular subject.

Link popularity is one factor that determines your search ranking on a particular subject. A site with high link popularity is, in the search engine's mindset, a trusted website. A website that is updated on a regular basis with fresh relevant content, and prompts webmasters to link back without being asked, has the potential for excellent link popularity.

Some strategies believed to affect link popularity include :

• Creating links from a site's home page (usually index.html) to all subpages within the site, so a search engine can transfer some link popularity to the subpages.
• Approaching websites with high Google PageRank to link to your site (see How Google Works for information on PageRank)
• Encouraging one-way links to your site, where no reciprocation is needed on your part (therefore, links from directories like Yahoo! and the Open Directory Project are prized
• Creating links on your site to relevant, trusted site, and avoiding links to "spam"-style sites, link farms, and dubious sites
• Avoiding link exchange with non-relevant websites

(Source: Wikipedia)

Danny Sullivan's article "Measuring Link Popularity" details methods to determine a site's popularity in engines.

Link Popularity Tools

LinkPopularity.com - Determine your site's link popularity
MarketLeap - Check your link popularity against competing websites
Market Position's Link Popularity Check tool

Alexa Rank

Aside from Google PageRank, some SEO agents look to Alexa's Traffic Rank system to determine a site's popularity in search. Here, websites are assigned a hard number rank that details their popularity among the millions and millions of available websites. The lower your number, the more important your ranking (Yahoo! is at this writing ranked 1).

According to Alexa:

The traffic rank is based on three months of aggregated historical traffic data from millions of Alexa Toolbar users and is a combined measure of page views and users (reach). As a first step, Alexa computes the reach and number of page views for all sites on the Web on a daily basis. The main Alexa traffic rank is based on the geometric mean of these two quantities averaged over time (so that the rank of a site reflects both the number of users who visit that site as well as the number of pages on the site viewed by those users). The three-month change is determined by comparing the site's current rank with its rank from three months ago. For example, on July 1, the three-month change would show the difference between the rank based on traffic during the first quarter of the year and the rank based on traffic during the second quarter.

Quality links to your site, and quality content to encourage those links can help your link popularity and therefore your search rankings.

 

 

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