Generating Link Popularity

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by Aaron West

Just getting listed in search engines isn't enough these days. Search engines are finding that their visitors want better, more relevant results. To achieve this, many engines take link popularity into account when determining the order in which sites are listed.

How Does Link Popularity Work?

When some search engines index a page, they will check their database for how many pages are linking to that page (or domain). This will give the page a 'link popularity' rating. In some cases, such as Google, it will also use the link popularity of the site that is linking to that page to determine the quality of the link. For example, a link from C-net would push the rating much higher than a link from a personal page.

When a search is performed, the engine will first scan for relevant results. Once it has the results, it will use the link popularity rating to sort the results. You can see great examples of this by performing searches in Google. Most of the results for general query's are from high traffic sites. For example, the top 3 results on Google for an 'entertainment' search are Netscape, Lycos, and Yahoo.

Getting Links

So how is it that you get links?

First, the Web site must have quality content. A site with good content will get plenty of links from around the Web through no extra effort by the webmaster.

Another great way to get "quality" links is to get listed in search directories such as Yahoo and the Open Directory. These count as links from high traffic Web sites, and will increase your link popularity significantly. Getting a listing in the Open Directory will get your link on several Web sites, such as Lycos, AOL, and Altavista, since the data is syndicated on many engines.

You can find out more about getting listed in directories here.

Maintaining an affiliate program is also helpful. Many search engines will follow affiliate links and they will factor into the site's link popularity. An affiliate program can effectively give a site thousands of links on the Web.

Giving Links to the Engines

There could be thousands of pages linking to a site, but they don't help unless the search engines are aware of them. I have spent hours going through my referral logs and collecting urls of pages that link to my sites. I keep these urls in a text file for a mass submission I will do later on.

For the mass submission, I've found a freeware tool called Dumptruck very useful. You can download a copy of Dumptruck here. [http://www.trafficstudio.com/dumptruck/]. Dumptruck allows you to paste a list of urls into a text field and it will submit all of the urls to the top search engines. This works out perfectly, since the top search engines are really all that matter when it comes to popularity anyway.

When I ran my own site, I did this once a month and would then check the results. My link popularity always increased, and sometimes it nearly doubled my search traffic. All of this happened without any of my own pages being changed or resubmitted.

Checking Your Popularity

So how do you find out how many sites are linking to yours? Many engines allow you to search directly for sites that link to yours. For example, if you search for 'link: http://www.yourdomain.com' at AltaVista, it will return all pages that link to that domain. Most search engines allow searches such as this, and they can be found by looking at the Help page or doing an advanced search.

I've found the tool at LinkPopularity.com to be quite helpful. Enter your domain name and it will check three search engines (Altavista, Hotbot, and Infoseek), and return how many sites are linking to yours.