As you can imagine, the Internet is getting bigger and bigger by the day, and the work of the search engines is getting tougher. Search engines are constantly looking for new ways to serve the most accurate and relevant results to its visitors.

The search engines have included Popularity Factors into their ranking algorithm in order to create better relevancy formulae. This does not mean that the on-the-page factors or the importance of content can be ignored. If there are two sites with equally optimised meta tags and attractive content, the site having more Link Popularity will have a higher search engine position.

The result is that on-the-page optimisation will not get you top ranking by itself unless your site is enhanced with high-end link popularity.

The main objective of search engines is to bring to you the web sites which are recommended by other web sites. By doing so, web sites that are ranked according to Popularity, neutralises the effects of Search Engine Spamming and manipulation of the on-the-page factors. Search engines, like Google are able to provide excellent search experiences for surfers by including Popularity Factors into their ranking algorithm.

Defining Link Popularity

In a nutshell, Link popularity of a web site is the total number of web sites linking to it. Search engines must index the web page that your link appears on. In the past, people believed that just the "Number" of sites pointing to your site determines the Link Popularity. The more sites linking to your site, the higher your ranking will be. This is just the first half of the Link Popularity story.

Link analysis is closely related to Link Popularity, but with a twist. Link analysis (or link popularity analysis) is the number and quality of the inbound links that point to your site. It is beyond the number of links. Here, it is not the number of links that matter, but the quality of these links that is important.

The search engine software engineers are not stupid. They know that many web masters create artificial links with the hope of boosting their ranks in the search engines, and that is why search engines make use of Link Analysis rather than Link Popularity.

Analysing and evaluating the number as well as the quality of links is actually Link Analysis. In this article, we'll look more closely at the other factors influencing link popularity (apart from the numbers of links) and how Link Analysis works.

How Search Engines use Link Analysis

Search engines use Link Analysis in their ranking algorithm, as it's difficult to get quality links for a site if it\'s not worth it. In a link analysis system, only the most relevant and popular sites will get a high search engine rank. Link Analysis is a very useful and foolproof way to determine which pages are good for particular key phrases. It is a mathematical way to determine if others in your industry think that your site is important.

Link popularity vs. link analysis
Quantity vs. quality of the links

By using the Link Analysis system, Spammers who set up several free sites and then link to their main web site are easily filtered out. Links from free web sites are not given importance in their Link Popularity scores nor do the use of links to web sites that offer free tools and utilities. They combine link popularity with Link Analysis and use it to assign a weighted Link Popularity score.

Not all links on the Internet are equally important. Crawlers analyze the quality of the web sites. It's important to get links from popular web sites which are related to the keywords you want to be found for. It is far better, and it will improve your Search Engine Ranking, to have a few links from more popular sites than having tons of links from unpopular web sites.

The other factors in a Link Analysis system are:

• Context of the links
• Authority of the web sites
• Number of outbound links from a web site
• Similarity in themes between the linking sites.

You have to associated with reputable web sites whose keywords are related to yours, in order to score high search engine ranks in the search engines that use link analysis in their ranking algorithm. It's also important to use targeted Keywords throughout your site, and have relevant explanatory text around your Keywords and Links.

How to measure Link Popularity

Each search engine has it's own method of determining and Anylising Link popularity. AltaVista may rate a high Link Popularity for your site, whereas Google may rate a low popularity for your site. This is because each search engine uses the popularity information in different ways, and it will depend on their specific algorithms.

Visit the home page of the specific search engine and type the formulae we have mentioned in the search box and click on search. Notice that we have eliminated http://www. in the urls. While measuring Link Popularity, substitute your own web site name in the domain name. Do not forget to include the .co.za .com, .net or .org in the domain names.

Altavista & Infoseek

link:domainname

This will return the total number of sites linking to your domain.

As the web pages of a site sometimes link to each other, in this result, the web pages of noname.com itself which are linked to its index file will also be included. To eliminate the web pages of the same domain, the syntax is,

link:domainname -url:domainname

To find out the Link Popularity of a particular web page, type

link:domainname/filename.html

Directhit

There is no way to determine the Link Popularity of a web site in Direct Hit.

Google

link:domainname.com

It will return the number of web sites linking to the site noname.com. But there is no command to eliminate the web pages, which are linking to its own domain.

Hotbot and other Inktomi powered search engines like AOL, iWon and MSN

linkdomain:domainname

It returns the total number of web sites linking to the domain.

linkdomain:domainname - domain:domainname

It returns the total number of web sites linking to the domain after eliminating the links from the same domain.

Fast

link.all:domainname

Returns the web pages linking to your domain.