All about link popularity and pagerank

[arpan911]

Understanding Link Popularity

The most important thing you must understand when working with link popularity is that every page is treated as a separate entity. What this means is that internal links, that is links between the pages of your site, do count. In fact search engines make no distinction between those links and links from other outside pages. This is something that many people get hung up on, they do not understand why search engines would count internal links. What they don't realize is that there is really no way to tell if a link is from an internal or external page, since some sites span multiple domains and multiple sites can exist on one domain.

Another issue that some people get hung up on is that they think that reciprocal links can hurt you, meaning if you link to a page that links to you then those links won't count. This is also not true for somewhat the same reasons mentioned above. The search engines have no way of tracking this because the path of a link might lead off your site and then go to two other pages before there is a link back to your site. Imagine looking for such "link loops" on a billion interconnected pages. It's simply not technologically feasible to do, so the fair thing to do is to simply count all links, which is what search engines do.

Now link popularity is not a purely quantitative measurement. Instead the quality of links often counts more than the sheer number of links. Quality plays a role in two different ways. The first is that the context of your link is important. If you want to rank high on certain keywords then you need the pages that link to you to be related to those keywords. If the pages linking to you are not related to your site's keywords then they will do little to raise your ranking for those keywords. Also, more specifically, the text directly surrounding your link, or the text within the link itself, as well as any nearby headers or the page title can all influence what the search engine sees as the context of your link. If you read my article on choosing the right domain name you might remember that having a keyword rich domain name or site title can again help your rank. Since people will link to you using your domain name or site title, having keywords in them, and thus in your link text, can help with link popularity in this manner. In fact having people link to you using your keywords is extremely important and beneficial, and of course using keywords in your own internal links helps as well. For instance it is common to link to your home page using the word "Home." Don't do this, instead use your keywords in the link. Sure it may look a little funny but the benefit will be immense. I have a page that got ranked #1 on AltaVista on a search that returned over 8 million results and it was ranked higher than some rather large corporate entities such as NASDAQ. The reason? I linked to this page on every of nearly 10,000 pages on my site using my desired keywords. The text inside the links that point to your site is extremely important and a big reason why you need keywords in your domain and site name. Even a link from a completely unrelated site will still help if your keywords are in the anchor text.

The second way quality matters is that pages that rank high themselves carry more influence than those with low ranks. So getting an inbound link from a very popular site can help more than one from an unpopular site. Also how much benefit you gain from a link is dependent on how many other links are on that page. So being the only link on a page will garner more benefit than being one of one hundred links. I often compare this to sharing a pizza. If you have a pizza and share it with 2 people, each person will get more than if you shared it with 10 people. Also if the pizza is larger to begin with everyone will get more. So you'll get a larger benefit from being linked to from a page with a high rank and few links than from a page with a low rank and many links.

This brings me to another important issue. Many people operate under the impression that being in link farms, or FFA (Free-For-All Link Sites), which are basically pages filled with hundreds or thousands or unrelated off topic links, can hurt their ranking or get them banned. This is not true for two reasons. The first is an ethical reason, since a webmaster has no control over who links to them, no inbound link will ever penalize you. The second reason is that it is simply unnecessary to penalize people for doing this. A link farm will not have much weight to begin with, and since the rank is diluted by such large numbers, the benefit gained from such a link will be almost unnoticeable. Though I have read stories of people who went up one whole Google PageRank (see below) by getting such a link, this is more likely because they were on the extreme borderline before and that one rather weak link pushed them over.

So while getting a large amount of incoming links is important, the weight and context of these links are what will a make a difference in your ranking.

The final thing you must know about how link popularity works has to do with redirects. Depending on the type of redirection used search engines will not assign any rank to the resulting page. So if people link to you using a long complicated affiliate URL, or vice versa, those links will not count. For the most part link popularity is tied to the URL, so to build a high link popularity you need all the links pointing to this same URL, not any variation or mirror of it. If you want to maintain search engine rankings you should try using a "301 Redirect." This type of redirect sends a special HTTP header to the client that should tell the search engines to apply the weight to the resulting page.

Google and PageRank

Google uses link popularity more than any other engine, and it also provides the best tools for measuring your link popularity. Also Google is the most popular search engine in the world, and link popularity matters more than any other criteria when ranking high in it. As such I've decided to devote an entire section just on how Google uses link popularity. Since Google also pioneered the modern link popularity approach what you learn off Google can be applied with success to other engines that use link popularity (in all honestly most major search engines have more or less copied Googles ranking algorithm and overall site layout).

The first thing I need to mention is the Google Toolbar. Google offers a plugin for Internet Explorer that provides some various features. These include a bar which displays the current URL's page rank, as well as easy one click ability to check which sites link to the current page. I cannot recommend enough this toolbar, I consider it a must for any webmaster.

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The Google Toolbar

The first thing you will notice in the toolbar is a green bar that indicates PageRank. To find the specific numerical value associated with the green bar you can hover the mouse over it. PageRank is Google's version of link popularity and takes the weight and context of incoming links into account. The amount of PageRank needed for each individual level increases exponentially. It is much easier to go from a rank of 3 to 4 than to go from 5 to 6. In fact one or two good links could very well give a page a rank of 4, however you might need a thousand to get a 6. Its very hard to figure out exactly what the formula is, but research done by myself points to the base being a 4 or a 5. So each level would be 4 or 5 times as hard to reach as the one previous to it.

It is important to note that the value given in the toolbar is not always accurate. If you are visiting a page that Google has not yet spidered, but they have spidered the root domain of the site, then they will guess a PageRank based on the distance from the root of the site to your current position. This is only a guess and has no bearing on ranking. Once Google spiders the page they will assign an actual PageRank to it. This guessing behavior is the reason why some Geocities pages seem to have high PageRanks, the fact is they've simply not been spidered yet.

The other thing the toolbar is specifically useful for is that it allows you to easily check backwards links. Directly to the right of the PageRank bar you should notice a "Page Info" button, if you click on this you should see an option for backward links. Selecting that will give you a list of all the links Google has in it's public index. You will run into cases where a page has a rank in the PageRank bar but you can find no backward links. This can happen for two reasons. The first is that Google has not spidered the page. Sometimes when Google has not spidered a page the toolbar will guess a ranking based on the domain (assuming it has spidered the domain) this ranking is really just a guess and has no weight at all. This is why pages on free hosts such as Geocities seem to have a high a PageRank, when in reality they've just never been spidered.

The other reason a ranked page may show no backwards links is that Google does not put every page it spiders into it's public index. If a page itself does not have a very high PageRank, perhaps because it only has one inbound link or something of that nature, then while Google will note and count the outward links on that page the page itself will not be listed in the index. This is evident in the various popular directories like DMOZ or Yahoo. If you have a directory listing in an obscure subcategory then that listing will indeed raise your rank but the subcategory itself may not be listed in the index.
Your Overall PageRank Power

Getting a good PageRank for your homepage is important, but it is not the most important value for your site. Your Overall PageRank Power, a term coined by yours truly, is much more important than the PR of any given page. Your Overall PageRank Power is the total PageRank a page would get if it were linked to from every page on your site, and only from your site. Finding your Overall PageRank Power is fairly simple. Chances are you have a disclaimer or a privacy policy or something of that nature linked to from every page of your site, and these types of pages don't get links from outside sites. So to find your Overall PageRank Power you simply need to look at the PR of your privacy policy page or your disclaimer.

Overall PageRank Power is important and useful in a number of ways. For instance if you were buying a site knowing it's Overall PageRank Power, the total amount of weight it could contribute, would be very useful. If you were planning on building a complementary site to one of your current sites, knowing the Overall PageRank Power of the current site would like you know how much benefit you could get by cross-linking them. In that manner you could also use it to decide if you want to make a complementary site. For instance if you know the current #1 site on that topic has a PageRank of "5" and your Overall PageRank Power is a "6" then you can be confident that if you do make this site and cross-promote it with your current site then it will rank well.

For more information on using your Overall PageRank Power see the our article entitled "Affiliate Gold."

Building Link Popularity

Any link to your site can help build link popularity, so the number of ways to build link popularity is beyond count. I'm only going to focus on the most common methods here, but if you can think of a new and innovative way to get people to link to you then by all means go for it.

The most obvious way to get people to link to you is to ask them, however this method is often overlooked or purposely ignored by people who simply believe that it won't work. Simply asking people in fact works very well, you just need to do it right.

The first thing you need to do is locate your targets, who is it that you want to link to you? Well if you want to rank #1 then the people that link to the #1 site need to link to you right? To find out who links to the #1 site search on Google for your desired keywords and then using the toolbar check the backward links of the first site that comes up. These are the sites that you need to get to link to you. Now it may not be possible to get all of them, but get as many as you can.

Why would someone add a link you might wonder? Well if your site is well designed with plenty of useful content (and if it isn't then you need to go back and reread the first few chapters), then why wouldn't someone want to link to you? Part of the value of a website is that it can lead you to the right information if you can't find it there. So having a list of links to high quality content rich sites adds value to the site with the links. You'd be surprised at how many people will add a link if you ask them nicely. It also doesn't hurt to mention how you think your site would be a good resource for their visitors. This is especially true with amateur sites, and believe it or not amateur sites are important. Sure these sites might not have the best designs but since they've been online for years they've accrued quite a few inbound links and a high link popularity rating. The people who run these sites aren't out to make money so they don't mind linking to you if you have a good site, they're noncombatants so to speak.

If you can't get a free link you might be able to get a link exchange, where you link to their site and they link to yours. This is more typical of for-profit sites. Here is where the Google Toolbar will again come in useful. You will be able to tell which pages have a higher PageRank so you know which ones will be worth it more to exchange links with. I don't want to suggest that every link doesn't count, because they do all count. Sometimes though you want to limit the number of links you have and this is one way to do that.

When sending out these link requests you need to be careful about spam. Contrary to popular belief spam is any unsolicited email. The message doesn't have to be commercial, it doesn't have to be bulk. Sending a single unsolicited message can be considered spam and if the recipient complains it may be enough for your host to suspend your account. So if there isn't an email address available on the site for comments, suggestions, proposals, or anything of that nature then you shouldn't just blindly email them. Some people really hate solicitations and it is better to be safe than sorry.

The final thing you may discover when doing a backwards link search is specialized directories. Though they are not as popular as big directories like DMOZ or Yahoo, smaller specialized directories can be a viable source of traffic and link popularity, so be sure to submit to every one you find.

Another way to find smaller places to submit is to search on Google for the words "Add URL" or "Submit URL" (or any other variation of related text such as "Submit site") and your keywords. This will find a slew of places for you to submit your site to.

If you post in forums or newsgroups this can be another way to get link popularity. Always include a signature with a link to your URL and if a spider visits the forum, and I should note not all forums welcome spiders, every single post can help your link popularity. I have seen people get a Google PageRank of 6 simply from a large amount of forum posts. You may think this is impossible, but after a few years of visiting a forum regularly you can have a few thousand posts, and that would translate to a few thousand links to your site. Plus if you're going to be posting anyways, adding a signature is not that much work.

Another way to get incoming links is by writing articles. Most sites provide their author's with a signature for their articles where they're allowed to link to or promote their sites. Take advantage of this, if you can write for a site that is related to your content this can help a lot, if the site isn't related to your content it will still help thanks to the keywords in the links themselves. Additionally writing for more popular sites will obviously bring in more benefit that writing for less popular sites. This site for instance welcomes article submissions.

Another, albeit harder, method of getting incoming links is to get media exposure. Sometimes you can jumpstart media exposure using press releases, however luck could bring it in as well. Whether your site gets mentioned in an online new source, or if it's mentioned in an offline source that has a website, either way a link from a prestigious news source can bring in a great deal of PageRank. This is especially true if your article is on the front page when the spider happens to visit. Even relatively unknown or local news websites still usually have high PageRanks, so just because it isn't CNN doesn't mean it won't help.

The final thing you need to do to get link popularity is to help the search engines find the sites that link to you. It should be a daily habit to check your referrer logs. I'll admit that when your site becomes popular and you are getting visitors from thousands of referrers each day that it gets kind of boring, but it is very important. Every time you come across a new site linking to you, submit it to the search engines. You can also compare what Google and a different engine such as AltaVista show for your backwards links, and cross submit the ones that are missing.

Retaining Link Popularity

Any link leading away from your site can indeed lower your PageRank indirectly. Since internal links within your site do count if you have to divide the weight of one of your pages between internal links and external links then of course the internal ones will carry less weight than if the external links weren't there. So in addition to getting link popularity it is also important to keep that popularity within your site.

There are a few ways to do this, one easy and often taken for granted method is simply to include a large amount of internal links on every page. If you include a menu of 20 or so internal links on every page then a single external link on one of those pages will take little overall rank away from the internal links.

If it is not possible to vastly outnumber the external links with internal ones then there are other methods you can use to increase the amount of rank retained in your site. You could group all of your outbound links in a single link page, which is a very popular practice. However be sure you don't put a link to the link page on every page of your site, as many do. Instead provide a link to your link page in one location, such as the bottom of your home page. You really want to limit the amount of rank you give your link page because nearly all of it will be given away instead of being recycled back through your site.

Another thing you can do is make your links in javascript or with forms. Since spiders do not read javascript or forms by making such links you should effectively stop the flow of page rank away from your site. Now using this method is fine for instances where it is not involved in a link exchange, however when you're doing this in a link exchange it presents an ethical dilemma. If someone enters into a link exchange with you for the purpose of increasing link popularity then such linking methods might be upsetting to them. In contrast if the person doesn't know what link popularity is and really just wants to get the raw visitors you will send them then they may not mind the javascript links. My advice is simply to not misrepresent yourself. If you're straight forward with everything, including showing them an example link, then your ethics are intact. If they object to the use of javascript you can always choose to not link to them or provide them with a standard HTML link. Of course, with affiliate program links or any outbound links you don't have an agreement about, you should use these techniques to help maintain link popularity. These methods, due to my water analogy below, are known as "plugging holes." Which is another concept coined by yours truly.

Another issue is that you may have pages on your site that search engines don't need to see, yet that you must link to. The solution in this case is also to use navigation based on javascript or even better based on forms. For instance if you offer public profiles of your registered users and have 1000 users then that's 1000 pages that are sucking down PageRank that could be given to your articles. The solution would be to make access to such pages via a form or a javascript written link. Using the onclick event handler and a little bit a javascript you can easily make a page load when a form button is clicked, just like any other link. You can also use CSS to make the form buttons look like a text link.

When dealing with link popularity I find it easy to think of it like a bucket of water with incoming links being water poured in and outgoing links being water poured out. You need to be mindful of where you want the water to flow when managing your site. You can also use your own site to "launder" the link popularity gained from other sites. For instance if you don't have keywords in your name or domain, and most of your incoming links do not contain your keywords, you can still get a benefit from this incoming links. Since those links do not have your keywords in them they won't help you get ranked higher on the search engines, however they still contribute to the overall weight of the page in question. If that page then links to another page on your site, using keywords, then you will have turned this out-of-context weight into context-specific weight. This is one reason why it is very important to use keywords and text links for all your internal site navigation, especially for links to and from your homepage.




just a look back.....

* Understanding Link Popularity
o Every page is treated as a separate entity.
o The weight of the links matters more than the number.
o Link context is very important.
* Google and PageRank
o Google's version of link popularity is called PageRank.
o The Google Toolbar allows you to check your PageRank.
* Calculating your Overall PageRank Power
o Your overall PageRank Power is the total amount of PageRank a page would get if it were linked to from every page on your site.
* Building Link Popularity
o Check up on who links to your competition.
o Submit to directories big and small.
o Email link requests and link exchange requests.
* Retaining Link Popularity
o Outnumber external links with internal ones.
o Use forms or javascript for external or affiliate links.
o If you do not want a search engine to view a page link to it using a form or javascript.



By: Chris Beasley

[happydix]

It took me quite a while to finish reading your post arpan911.. But it helped me a lot though. Thanks!

[maggots]

lol, well, it's a great article arpan, thanks for sharing

[Gracia]

A very good article and informative.

[mini_0]

I cannot even read this one full , it has almost all the things , .But iI think rapidly building links is not a good idea . Build your links gradually. Google’s robot is not as stupid as many people make it out to be. If you get 100 links in one day this will definitely red flag your site. The best way to do it is to gradually and consistently build links back to your site.A one way link is worth much more than a reciprocal link. Many link farms act as link exchanges where you can exchange links with other sites in your niche.