Link Popularity Building

Link popularity building is an off-site process of promoting your website. A website's link popularity is always crucial in gaining top 5 to top 10 search engine positioning for your competitive keywords.

What is Link Popularity?....

Link popularity is assessed by the number and quality of external incoming links pointing to a website. 'External incoming links' are links on other sites that point to yours.

Why is Link Popularity Important?....

Link popularity is such an important factor that search engines take into consideration because they see links from other sites to yours as a kind of 'recommendation' or 'guarantee'.

With so many people using spamming techniques to try and trick the search engines into positioning their sites higher, the search engines are always looking for ways to sort the websites with genuine content from the spammers. Assigning a link popularity value to a website based on the number of incoming quality links pointing to a site is an effective way of determining whether a site has useful content or not because if other people think it does, then surely it must. Of course, people are finding ways of artificially inflating their link popularity to exploit this search engine ranking factor.

How is Link Popularity built?....

Building link popularity is a simple but work-intensive process. The aim is to establish links to your website from other topic related websites. This involves contacting potential linking partners and requesting a link to your site and offering a link to theirs in return. The reason link popularity building for your site takes a lot of work is that it takes time to find related sites and email them. Of course not all websites you contact will be interested.

At GCT Search Engine Placement, we use experience based on past successes to research, contact, and establish quality link exchanges for your website.

Link Popularity Don'ts

If you read policies posted on the major search engines' websites, you will find they all agree that their aim is to help searchers find websites that provide the most relevant information. Their advice to webmasters always warn explicitly against spamming.

A lot of webmasters and even professional SEOs use some of the following methods to increase link popularity:

• Submission to FFA link pages - These are pages that allow webmasters to automatically add a link to their site, no matter what the subject is. Search engines frequently remove these from their indexes.
• Subscription to webrings - Also known as link farms, these are networks of sites all linking to each other for the sole purpose of increasing link popularity. Search engines abhor webrings and remove them.
• Over-submitting to web directories - This involves trying to get a site listed in more categories then it warrants at free directories like DMOZ. This puts your site in danger of being removed altogether.

The strategies above people use to generate link popularity are all considered spamming by the search engines and should be avoided.

GCT Search Engine Placement does not employ spamming techniques like the ones above to promote clients sites.