Link Popularity: Evaluating Links Instead of Just Counting
What link popularity means, which quality characteristics are important and why pure quantity consideration falls short.
The topic is especially important when rankings, trust or the evaluation of external signals are unclear. In practice, it is almost always worth looking at quality, context and risks instead of pure quantity values.
What link popularity means, which quality characteristics are important and why pure quantity consideration falls short. This wiki page arranges the topic practically and shows, When priority arises, which mistakes are often and how you derive concrete measures from them.
Example: A thousand links are from a single website
A footer link appears on a thousand subpages of the same portal. Another link report cites ten editorial references from ten different websites. The raw link number describes these two situations inadequately.
Separate links, referring domains, and relevant landing pages. Also check the deduplication and collection date of the respective tool. More counted links do not automatically mean more authority or more visitors; context and actual use are additional criteria.
About the PageRank
Larry Page studied the influence of backlinks on the ranking of websites in the mid-1990s at Stanford University in the then young Public Internet (the network for all, whose predecessor as a military network dates back to the early 1960s, until the Arpanet also connected universities from 1969). He noted that it depends not only on the number of backlinks, but also on the weight of the pages from which they originate.
In addition, he found a number of other influences that influence the quality of a backlink. So it was already then (and still is today) very bad, if from a single page several backlinks go to the same other page. Also, backlinks are not very useful if they come from the same account of the webmaster. Many webmasters, for example, use the Google Blogger program, blog there diligently and then link to their own websites, which are also logged in under their Google account. There is little to no point in that. From the point of view of users and the search engine, it is simply clumsy self-promotion.
Another relatively useless measure is sending backlinks from foreign blogs or forums with little reach. Not even the backlinks from social networks such as Twitter or Facebook (whose triumphal march only began after 2000) brings much. In short, links that are very easy to generate are not very valuable: their link popularity is low. Search engines such as Google are designed to promote the exchange of information via linking between foreign participants. Although a lot has changed on the Internet since 1997, the basic principle was already the same at that time. After all, Larry Page had participated as Google co-founder. The basic intention followed two paradigms from the beginning:
- #1: When other website operators link to a website, their content seems to be so valuable that it justifies a higher ranking.
- #2: The ranking increases the more backlinks the linking page itself has. It is important on its part, which is why a backlink from it is particularly valuable.
This could also be translated literally as “class rather than mass”. Nevertheless, of course, the number of backlinks also plays a role. From these paradigms Larry Page derived his PageRank.
How to increase link popularity?
It is about generating backlinks from foreign and strong sites. Anyone who receives a backlink from Wikipedia, for example, generates a very strong link popularity. Of course, this is not easy. The webmaster can hardly create such backlinks himself, unless he himself writes a Wikipedia article and mentions his own website as a source.
Such attempts exist, but they are not very successful, because the articles are reviewed in the online encyclopedia and the committee of Wikipedia recognizes the context and at least eliminates the backlink, if not the entire article. Rather, it succeeds in accommodating articles with backlinks in wide-reaching press portals. An example would be online PR. This is allowed there, but the portal is of course flooded with articles every second, which is why a contribution must be very well optimized in itself and contain first-class content, so that it is perceived as relevant at all.
The most elegant solution is really for your own website High quality content to create and at the same time optimize this page so that other users find it and occasionally voluntarily link to it – in the best case from their own, strong website. This creates backlinks with the highest link popularity.