Is
your site being penalized for low link popularity?
Link Popularity
(the number of web pages that link to a site) has become a critically
important factor in driving traffic to a web site. Unfortunately,
new sites and sites with low link popularity are at an severe disadvantage
and often find it very hard to attract new visitors. Here's why...
Although
rarely stated in plain english, search engines do not like
and do not trust unpopular web sites!
This sounds
extreme, but starts to make sense if you think about it from the
search engine's perspective. Search engines evaluate millions of
web pages and display them in order of relevancy. In the past, search
engines have played a continual cat and mouse game with thousands
of webmasters who try to 'trick the engines' or 'beat the system'.
Given the rewards of a good ranking, some webmasters would create
thousands of computer generated pages hoping to trick the search
engines into assigning them a good ranking. These pages would look
bad to a human, but would occasionally rank well. This happened
more and more, and engines started to fill up with 'junk' listings.
Around
this time, search engines started to discover that link popularity
was a very effective way to weed out 'junk' pages and a good way
to judge a site.
Link popularity is very difficult to abuse (a webmaster would have
to control tens or hundreds of sites located on different servers).
Also, search engines found that judging a site by who links to it
is one of the best indications of site quality. After all, not many
webmasters make a habit out of linking to bad or less than useful
web sites.
Although
search engines don't come right out and say they don't like unpopular
sites, it's easy to read between the lines...
1.
Search engines now discourage manually submitting your site saying
that they will find your site by following links on the web.
Google says
(in their FAQ) that submitting is not necessary and that "The
best way to ensure Google finds your site is for your page
to be linked from lots of pages on other sites. Google's robots
jump from page to page on the Web via hyperlinks, so the
more sites that link to you, the more likely it is that we'll
find you quickly."
Yahoo says
(in their FAQ) that "The Yahoo! Search index, which contains
several billion web pages, is more than 99%
populated through the free crawl process. Yahoo!
Search crawls the web every 2-4 weeks and automatically finds
new content for indexing."
MSN advises
(in their Site Owner Help) to "Make
sure that each page is accessible by at least one static text
link.".
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2.
Sites can be delisted from a search engine if enough pages do not
link to it.
In their FAQ, Google
explains that one of the possible reasons your web
pages used to be listed and are now aren't is that.... 'The
contents of your page or the links
pointing to your page changed significantly and you no longer
have a sufficiently high PageRank, or your page
had low PageRank to begin with and a small change caused you
to be dropped from the Google index.'
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3.
Once included in a search engine index, sites with higher link popularity
are heavily favored
Google says
(in their Technology Overview) that "PageRank relies
on the uniquely democratic nature of the web by using its
vast link structure as an indicator of an individual page's
value. In essence, Google
interprets a link from page A to page B as a vote, by page
A, for page B. "
Yahoo suggests
(in their FAQ),that you should "Correspond
with webmasters and other content providers and build rich
linkages between related pages." to improve
the ranking of your web site in their search results.
MSN says (in
their Site Owner Help section), "The MSN Search ranking
algorithm analyzes factors such as page content, the
number and quality of sites that link to your pages,
and the relevance of your site’s content to keywords."
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How
many links is enough?
Once site
owners realize the importance of link popularity, the first question
they ask is usually 'how many links do I need?'. The frustrating
answer is.... it depends!
All
sites need a basic amount of links as a starting point.
These links prevent the search engines from treating a site as an
"orphan site" (one which is not linked to) and improve
the chances of the search engine finding the site's pages to add
to its index.
Some
sites only need ten or twenty good incoming links to rank well.
Others in highly competitive industries need hundreds or even thousands.
The best way to tell is to run a Link Popularity report on your
site and on your competitors' sites. If your competition is outranking
you and has many more incoming links, you should probably start
thinking about increasing your link popularity.
Increasing
your link popularity
Luckily,
there are several highly effective ways of increasing your link
popularity. Proper use of link popularity reports can give you the
information you need to evaluate your situation and act accordingly.
Better yet, running the right link popularity reports can show you
exactly where your competitors are receiving traffic from and provide
you with hundreds of handpicked sites interested in linking to your
site.
Next: How
to jumpstart your link popularity...
