Figuring Out Your Link Popularity

Link popularity is a common term that is used with internet marketing. It basically means how many links to your website from other sites on the internet there are. There are various ways to measure this and this article will help you make sense of them.

Link popularity is important to all webmasters. It determines where you rank on the search engine pages for your keywords and can be absolutely vital in getting that coveted number one space on Google! While other factors are included in the equation, link popularity definitely figures high on the list and you should do your best to increase your incoming link as much as possible.

First of all, if you just want to check and see how many other ranked sites are linked to you on any particular search engine, you can simply enter “link:” (minus quotation marks) followed by the URL of your website and hit Enter. This will quickly turn up a basic link popularity count for you and is a good indication of the number of links you have from other areas.

It is important to note that you will get different results from different search engines because each search engine ranks link popularity according the links that it personally knows about. So if a website that links to you has made it onto Yahoo’s list, but not Google’s, it will only appear as a link in your link popularity rating when you do a search on Yahoo. On Google, you will be at least one link down.

Also, there are filters that may prohibit backlinks from being counted toward your site. This can affect your link popularity rating as well, changing it from search engine to search engine. It can also change with time, as the search engines are constantly adjusting their filters and requisites for link popularity.

PageRank, by Google is a basic form of link popularity, ranking sites from 0 (no link popularity) to 6 (amazingly high link popularity) must be taken with a grain of salt because of the above. There are most likely many sites that link to you which are not yet listed on Google and have not been spidered. They will not show up on your PageRank number until Google has checked them and only then if they are not banned by the filtering system which is notoriously difficult to get through on Google.

There are special freeware and shareware programs such as Link Popularity Check 3.0.3. You can install these on your computer and check your link popularity at any point with the click of a mouse. Or, if you prefer not to download anything, you can find several link popularity counters online. Some can even be set up right on your website, to display your link popularity stats to the public. This is only recommended if you happen to have fairly high ratings, otherwise, you are simply advertising that you are not very popular!

Link popularity is fairly easy to check and it is worth keeping an eye on after any promotional campaign. This way, you can see which marketing techniques boost your ratings more and continue only with the successful ones.