Linkability – Link Popularity

After you’ve validated your web page’s code, content for search engines, is there anything else you can do to maximize your search engine ranking? Yes, there is. It’s known as linkability or link popularity.

Google and other modern search engines are now determining a website’s ranking using the theory that if everyone is talking about it, it must be good. Ah, the old word-of-mouth advertising method.

By checking to see what pages you link to, and, more importantly, who links to your site, they can tell how many people are “talking” about you, and the more the merrier.

But it doesn’t stop there. The software actually evaluates “who” is talking about you and whether or not they are a reliable source. After all, it isn’t just who is talking about you, it’s their reputation for saying things about others that comes into play. Not much different from the real world.

If Aunt Sally is a gossip, and you can’t trust what she says, then you rarely take her seriously. But when Aunt Sue speaks, everyone listens, because they value her opinion and honesty. The key to gaining ground in the ranks is to not only get everyone talking about you, but to get the right people talking about you.

Linking, Link to us, Link Exchange

The premise of link popularity comes from the world of academia. If your thesis or paper is worthy of citation (others referencing it in their articles and papers), then it must have value. Therefore, if your site has value within its content, people should naturally be willing to link to it as a recommendation of its value as a resource.

In a perfect world, it would be a nice thing if someone links to you, you linked back to them. This is not always possible. Some sites feature thousands of external links. While it would be nice if Blogger XYZ linked back to this site because I mentioned them, it would be nearly impossible for the US Embassy or US State Department Travel pages to link to us, even though we list their site numerous times within our pages to help travelers.

But Google can trace our link to the US Embassy or State Department and say to itself, “well, they are linking to a page with serious value” and throw that into the sifting mix to decide how “worthy” we are in their ranks.

In order to get others to link to your pages and to be worthy of such links, you have to first provide value. As nature and travel photographers and writers, we decided to not just show off our pretty pictures ( of which we have a lot!), but to share our knowledge and experiences on how we got those pretty pictures. Here, on Lorelle on WordPress, I can share my enthusiasm for WordPress, blogging, writing, and website design and development. The better quality content I provide, the more likely people are to want to point out “Hey, I found great information there!” and do it with a link.

Other ways to increase your link popularity is to write articles, be interviewed, or be listed as a resource on other web pages. There are many services available that accept free, public domain (credited, copyrighted, but usually no pay) articles. Websites are hungry for content, and maybe you have an article they would snap up, thereby giving you exposure and creating a link to your site as part of your byline or bio. If you are doing something interesting or extraordinary, then get yourself interviewed by a webzine or Website, and get a link from that page to your site. You can also send out press releases frequently to let organization know that your page is a valuable resource and that you are doing something interesting, and create a few more links.

Many people eager to get noticed by search engines flock to Link Exchange services. I’ve tried those from time to time and found them to be high effort for little return. Of course, I’m really picky about who I link to, and these sites tend to not be so particular. And honestly, search engines know that game and will often ignore such efforts or even penalize you.

In the early days of link popularity, people didn’t care who they linked to, just as long as they had huge numbers of links, pushing up the link popularity ratings. Link farms, link and banner exchanges, and other gimmicks started popping up everywhere. Google and other search engines were quick to figure out the games people were playing with them, and they put a stop to it. “Spamming” or “flooding” a website with massive links to other pages just for the sake of linking is now worthy of banning, and some of those bans are permanent. If you are considering boosting your search engine ranks this way, don’t. It could cost you. Play fair.

WordPress: Pings, Trackbacks, Tags, and Comments

It takes little effort for your WordPress site or blog to be noticed by search engines. The developers have worked overtime to make sure that sites run with WordPress are as search engine friendly as it is possible to be. You don’t even have to add any gimmicks. It will work right out of the box.

But it does help to understand how it works and what you can do to improve your odds. So let’s take a quick look at how pings, blogrolls, trackbacks, and comments help your linkability.

Pings are basically signals sent across the net that let a search engine or directory know that you’ve updated your site. In the most simple terms, it knocks on the door and asks the search engine to come visit.

Trackbacks are notes from other trackback enabled sites that link to one of your posts and they “send you a note” to that post in the comments that says “I linked to this post”, quoting the content immediately around the link. These trackback comments help to link the web together and increase your link popularity. It also helps users know what others are saying about your post and information.

Tags or tagging are like keywords on your site, but they are also more like categories. They are words that represent the categorical content of your site. You can see a list of some of the tags associated with this post at the bottom of the article. These are used by tag search engines and directories to catalog your site in their database. By default, all WordPress categories are automatically marked as tags, though users of the full version of WordPress can add more tagging features.

Comments are a great way to create interactivity on your site. Unfortunately, due to the massive rise in comment spam, WordPress and others have built in a nofollow attribute to any links found within a comment to instruct search engines not to follow the link. Some complain that this hurts link popularity, but I say it increases it. Leave a great comment and the odds are that the site administrator/owner will visit your site to check you out. If your content is worthy, you might get added to their blogroll or written up in their blog. This gives even more meaning to the link and the value of the link.

All of these features come right out of the box with every WordPress version, so you don’t have to do anything special. Unless you want to.

More Resources and Information on Link Popularity

Developing your linkability doesn’t happen overnight. Plan for your link popularity to rise over years, not months, though search engines are getting faster and faster to respond to pings and submissions. You can test your own site’s link popularity on Google by typing link:www.mywebsite.com in the search box to see who is linking to you.

To find out now how your link popularity rating is, here are a few resources:

Link Popularity Testers

• Sitepopularity.org
• Enginemage
• Market Leap
• Alltheweb.com (Type the web page address in the search bar)
• Ineedhits.com
• Link-popularity-checker.com
• Link-popularity-tools.com
• Searchbliss.com (tests 5 search engines)
• Whose Linking to Your Site
• Link Tree
• Who are Your Competitors

Link Popularity – Articles

• Checking Your Listings in Search Engines
• Finding Out Your Link Popularity
• Improve Link Popularity in 10 Easy Steps
• Increase Search Engine Rank With Link Popularity
• Wikipedia – Link Popularity

Related Articles

• The Power of the Link
• How People Search the Web and How They Can Find Your Blog
• How Search Engines See, Search, and Visit Your Website
• Site Optimization: Checking Loose Links
• Secret Out – How Google Ranks Websites
• Link Referrals – Linking to Site Search Tags
• Blog Maintenance – Check For 404 Page Not Found Errors
• Those Pesky 404 Page Not Found Errors

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Copyright Lorelle VanFossen, member of the 9Rules Network