The link popularity or link popularity in English, is a measure of the number of hyperlinks that refer to a website. It is generally determined by the Page Rank algorithm (developed by Larry Page and Sergey Brin, the founders of Google Inc.).
Determining link popularity
The reason for its measurement is that the more links refer to a website, the higher its weighting or popularity will be. This produces a result in search engines where links to important web pages with high link popularity will show higher in the SERPs. The PageRank of the linked web page will be taken into account. The higher this is, the more valuable the backlink will be in addition. High PageRank websites have more link juice
Moz introduced an internal ranking factor to examine the popularity of links with MozRank.
Difference with click popularity
In contrast to the popularity of links, the click popularity It includes the behavior of users in the positioning procedure, in the sense that only the clicks of the visitors to the site count for the evaluation instead of the links on the document pages. This classification system is, nevertheless, susceptible to manipulation, since it can be influenced externally.
The ranking based on the PageRank algorithm and therefore on the popularity of the links, has caused some criticism. It is criticized that the mere relationship is more important in terms of positioning than the real interest of the reader. At the same time, the popularity of links is very prone to manipulation, for example buying or exchanging links. In excessive link building, many times the relevance of the links was not paid attention, which meant misleading information for users.
The idea behind the popularity of links was originally that only the websites that get many links would be the ones that would offer added value. Hence, it was in fact a quality index. Despite all this, with the use of manipulative methods, the quality of websites increasingly took a back seat, while websites with multiple links bought or exchanged rose to the top of the rankings.
Replaced by the popularity of the domain
Link popularity is increasingly being replaced by domain popularity. The difference is that in the popularity of the domain, various links from the same website are only counted as a recommendation. Consequently, the push of a web by means of innumerable links from the same site, as was frequent in the context of the popularity of the links, is no longer an alternative.
Relevance to SEO == ==
Google no longer only determines your position in link profiles. There has been too much manipulation in the past with methods that violate the Google Webmaster Guidelines in order to achieve a higher ranking. Hence, spammy comments on blogs and forums, entries in web catalogs and directories, links from social bookmarking services, and other similar dubious methods have been quite common in link profiling in a short time, regardless of the location. quality.
Google, despite everything, has expanded its algorithm in recent years successively. With major algorithm updates that have been named "Penguin", "Panda", "Hummingbird", and similar names, this has been changed so that the link profile is now just one of many ranking factors. High link popularity and now domain popularity is still very important for search engine optimization and should not be neglected. Regardless, only quality counts at the moment in this area. This means:
- Irrelevant blog links are considered very critically.
- An unbalanced link profile, which, for example, consists of only dofollow links or entirely of keyword links, is extremely suspicious.
- Buying links is frowned upon and penalties will be imposed on the relevant pages once discovered.
- Spam links, web directories, and social bookmarking are no longer important for building clean links. Theoretically, it might be useful to insert some of these links into the link portfolio to determine a natural link profile, but this is controversial.
- Ideally, the links should be the result of value-added content that other web operators will gladly link to.
It should be noted that there are still search engines whose algorithm is based on the popularity of links, for example, the Chinese search engine giant Baidu. It's based on Google's original algorithm, but it hasn't followed suit with updates in recent years. If you are looking to get the most out of your web portal for the Chinese market, you need to address the issue of link popularity.
