What is Link Popularity and how it helps in Search Engine Optmization?

Importance of link popularity in Search Engine Optimization

What is link popularity?
Link popularity is the measure of the popularity of a website in terms of the incoming links it has got. This is the measure of how many domains / websites have a LINK reference for a particular website.

Most of the major search engines now have crawler based mechanism to assign rankings to any website in search results for keywords. Therefore link popularity has become an important concept as it plays a vital role in getting higher ranks in search results. Crawler based search engines love to hear from others. They do not have much interest in what you are boasting of yourself. This concept makes Link Popularity, an important aspect in Organic Search Engine Optimization. More the other websites refer you; more popular are you in the eyes of search engines.

I will quote a simple example here.

If you wish to advertise about your retail shop, the more effective way is to put up 100 banners at establishments throughout the town rather than placing all 100 at your retail shop. In first case, the other establishments are referring you so your importance increases and your visibility / credibility will also increase thus giving you advantage. Similar is Link popularity for a website.

Link popularity always pays in long run. If you are serious about search engine optimization, branding of your website then link popularity has to be given a good weight age as this over a period of time pushes your website in rankings amazingly.

Conceptually there are 4 types of links which are considered for increasing link popularity. Each type has its own weight age and importance in search engine optimization.

Internal Links: This refers to the internal links of your own website pointing to various pages within the website. These need to be properly structures in order to contribute for link popularity.

Free links: There are many website which provide free links to other websites to make their content look rich and to attract more traffic.

Link exchange: Link exchange is an agreement where two websites place links to each other. This technique was useful till a couple of years ago but due to its misuse search engines do not give much importance to it.

Paid links: Some directories, websites charge to place the other website links. The charge can be one time or recurring.


Link popularity is a tool, if used effectively can improve your search rankings drastically across the major search engines. The quality and relevance of the links coming to your website is important and has to be kept in mind while carrying this exercise.

Himanshu Singh is the owner and founder of Bangalore based Internet Marketing firm Himshilp