The Search Marketing Advisor Newsletter Article: July 2005, Volume 4, Issue 7
Link Popularity: Good Link vs Bad Link?
by Russell Ain, Algorithmic Team Leader, iProspect
When the subject of link popularity is raised at a conference or seminar, everyone in the audience stiffens and sits up straight. “It’s so important,” “It’s the only reason my site isn’t doing well,” and other comments about the magnitude of its significance are made among those in the re-energized audience.
Link popularity is a very important component of your SEM campaign, but do you really want a couple hundred links from Aunt Emma’s catfish carving website to your e-commerce site for vitamins? No, me neither.
Let’s step back a bit and formally define link popularity for those not yet privy to this key SEM term. It simply means “the number and the nature of the links to and from your site.” Thus, the 200 or so links from Aunt Emma benefit you from a quantity perspective, but we are also interested in quality.
By “quality,” there are a few (but critical) characteristics of link popularity that need to be considered. In an attempt to better promote your vitamins, let’s take a look at some factors that constitute “quality:”
The words that are hyperlinked (read: in blue and underlined) to your site are called “anchor text.” The ideal approach to using anchor text is by implementing keyword phrases instead of just using the URL (i.e., “vitamins and mineral supplements” instead of just http://www.great-great-vitamins.com). This tells the search engine spider that your site is about “vitamins and mineral supplements” and serves to improve your rankings on those important keyword phrases.
Yes, those 200 links from your aunt are a nice gesture, but the fact that you have so many will trigger the spider’s “SPAM” alert, as these types of sites are called “link farms.” A better method is to have that number span across 200 pages.
At best, each one of those pages should also have content related to your site’s subject matter. Spiders can equate anchor text with the relevancy of a page’s content, so sites that review or discuss vitamins would be the best places from which to solicit links.
Sites that have such information usually understand the value of a link from their site. Thus, they might request a few bucks per link. If you’ve got the budget and they seem legit, go for it!
Finally, link popularity also considers your internal linking - links on your site that lead to other pages on your site. Make sure these links contain anchor text that sufficiently describes the page to which they are linking.
To thank her for the gesture, send a nice gift to Aunt Emma and wish her (and the catfish) all the best. But if she really wants to help enhance your link popularity, maybe she can talk her local pharmacy into posting your link on their site.
