link popularity and higher search engine ranking

Inbound Link Popularity Is Crucial To Higher Search Engine Ranking

Preface On The Value Of Link Popularity

At the present time, link popularity is of prime importance to search engine ranking. As more and more webmasters master the art of maximizing the derived value, the search engines could de-emphasize its importance or manipulate exactly how it is measured. Right now the following overview is the basic strategy of taking full advantage of its ranking benefits.

What Is Link Popularity?

And how does it effect “higher search engine ranking”? Once you’ve maximized “on-page” optimization ranking criteria, building link popularity will make a competitive difference…particularly for heavily competitive, high volume search terms.

Google’s interpretation of link popularity measurement is called PageRank™ hereafter referred to as “PR”. It is premised upon “voting popularity”. If Page A links to Page B, then Page A is casting a “popularity vote” for Page B. Google deems more popular sites as more important sites and gives them a ranking boost (advantage). However all links (votes) are not created equal. Votes cast by more popular sites (abundance of quality links) carry greater voting power than less important sites. Read this paragraph again – it gets a bit tricky. Essentially…the higher your PR, the more powerful your vote.

It’s sort of like having a beauty contest where votes from the most attractive judges count as greater value than votes from less attractive judges. Yes, beauty and attractiveness is a bit subjective and so is Google’s PR measurement system. But never-the-less that’s the premise. If you expect a search engine ranking advantage, you must have a PR strategy.

A PageRank™ ranking boost is applied to all websites that to some reasonable degree demonstrates content relevancy to a search query. If relevancy criteria were equally satisfied by all competing websites, the one with the greatest PR value would win.

Look at it this way, getting back to the beauty contest. Assume that all contestants equally satisfy the requirement of beginning beauty. The winner would be the lovely lady that received the greatest transfer of “voting power”. Ranking is therefore based upon best satisfaction of content relevancy criteria combined with high PR value.

The detailed intricacies of PageRank™ are highly complex and only Google knows the exact measurement criteria which are subject to subtle changes. But if you are into mathematical complexity read "PageRank™ Uncovered". This is an exceptional document study by Chris Ridings of Support Forums.org and Mike Shishigin, PhD of Website CEO.com.

Most website owners need to only know one thing about PageRank™. Get as much as you reasonably can. But there are proper ways to go about this, otherwise mistakes can be severely punishing. Google will penalize your PR to zero value and even banish your site from its index if you don’t play the game by its rules.