Link Popularity

The Importance of Reciprocal Links and Link Popularity

All the top search engines take into account the number of links pointing towards a site as a measure of its popularity when calculating relevance - the more incoming links, the more popular the site must be. As far as the search engine is concerned, if a site is popular it must be relevant.

Think of a link from site A to site strong as a vote for website strong by site A. If site A is a well ranked, popular site on a related subject to site B, it will be given a higher "weight" by the search engine than would a link from a site devoted to an unrelated subject and with a low ranking. It follows that the more "good quality" sites that can be persuaded to link to yours, the higher your site will be ranked, all other things being equal.

Although there are software programs available that will search for possible sites and send an automated request to the owner requesting a reciprocal link, we have found them to be less effective than a personal approach, in any case some of these systems are not approved of by search engines. One way of approaching the subject is to analyse the top ranked sites for keywords relevant to your site and finding out who links to them (this can be done by typing link:www.domain.com into most search engines). You could then approach the owners of these sites and request that they link to your site.

Our program includes the setting up of a "Partner Links" page on your site, and the building up of a collection of good quality, relevant incoming links that would also be of benefit to visitors to your website. We research the best quality prospective sites and compose a personalised e-mail to the owner suggesting how they would benefit by linking to you. We do this on an ongoing basis for the duration of our agreement with you and undertake to approach a predefined, minimum number of potential sites every month with reciprocal link requests.