Link Popularity

Link popularity is one of the most misunderstood components of a successful search engine optimization for a web site.  It refers to having links pointing to your web site from other web sites.  Link popularity helps search engines determine credibility, and authoritative content.  For Google, it is one of the more oft mentioned parts of PageRank, and search engine marketers will try to increase their PageRank by increasing their link popularity for a web site.

Black Hat Means Black Hole

There are a number of unethical techniques used to falsely increase link popularity.  The most used, and most dangerous, is the use of free for all (FFA) link farms.  FFA link farms are networks of web sites that do nothing but link to each other, to increase link popularity easily and quickly.  This is considered a spamming technique, and the major search engines will not only figure this out in a few days, but often will blackball all the websites that participate in it, by lowering or even deleting your listing from the search engine.  As this black hat technique was perfected by the many porn sites on the Internet, a web site will often end up with links to and from notorious sex and porn sites.

A professional link popularity campaign will entail a methodical process to identify and get links from highly credible web sites, that have relevancy to your web site.  Sometimes this includes reciprocal linking, whereby you may be required to link to the web site linking to you.  It can also include certain paid for listings, in directories and other web sites, that are purpose-built to increase link popularity ethically.