Link Popularity / Building

What is Link Building?

Link popularity can be complex! Don't worry - it's easy when you know the principles behind it.

Link popularity is how ‘popular’ a website is. Specifically, it is a measure of both the quantity AND quality of links from websites that link to a specific website. If you’ve every been on a website, then clicked on a hyperlink that goes to another website, that link factored into popularity.

Because search engines like Google are trying to recreate the human experience, and how many links a particular website has is a rough translation into how ‘popular’ that website is, then link popularity (and the tactics to increase it) is a strategy that is sought after by even the largest of websites, ones that have thousands of links already.

In comes link building. Link building is a loose association of principles to increase link popularity. You’ve probably seen spam that touts their ability to increase link popularity – and almost all of them never work, and some will harm your rankings in a big way.

Link Building Practical applications (The Application)

Increases ‘popularity’ of website in the eyes of search engines like Google.

Why it’s so important (The Result)

Increased popularity means increased rankings, and that means traffic.

Link Popularity Pitfalls

Since this is the one of two primary criteria that Google uses to qualify your page rankings, many Black Hat methods of artificial link popularity boosting have been devised. So many, in fact, that they should be mentioned:

Three way linking: this type (siteA ? siteB ? siteC ? siteA) tries to bypass the direct ‘link exchange’ between two sites, hoping to create a more natural ‘organic’ linking. It doesn’t work well. Taken to the nth degree, this becomes a link farm strategy, also completely useless.
Incestuous linking: when a single developer has a number of websites that cross link to one another, hoping to boost link popularity. If discovered, they can kill thousands of hours of work.
Overlinking: putting too many hyperlinks that are nonsensical (like hyperlinking to the date “2009?) or not useful. Also refers to saturating particular sentences with dozens of hyperlinks. Again, Google can spot this and the correct balance between too little and too much is essential.
Link Doping: refers to settin up gratuitous number of hyperlinks to a site, usually never being qualified, in exchange for a link back. Google laughs at this stuff.
Free for all linking: just what it sounds like. Remember, if it’s not useful to humans, it’s not useful to Google.
Link brokering: where you buy or rent links for placement. This usually blows up in the face of both parties.
Blind linking: Ever click on something and end up somewhere completely different? This is usually performed through a redirect
Blog commenting: Unless done honestly, you can bet that Google will ultimately disregard it or penalize you.

How we help.

ThinkAroundCorners has 9 years building link popularity 10 page from 4000 page websites. There are so many ways to increase link popularity naturally - if you know what you’re doing. Let us help you examine your current situation and build a link popularity strategy that will work for you.