Link Popularity is critical for those of us who actually want to get our sites noticed. And if you want to build a long term, sustainable income and lead source with your site, you need to understand how the search engines measure and qualify the links into your site.
Link Popularity Definition: simply put, link popularity is a measurement of the total amount of links coming into your site, as well as a determination of how high the quality of the links is. Simply put, the search engines are basically saying that if your site is any good, other sites should link to it. If nobody links to it, it's probably not relevant. And if your site isn't deemed relevant by the search engines, then don't expect much traffic from them.
Each search engine calculates link popularity differently. For example, Google is very concerned about the quality of the links, and is picky about which links it "counts." Yahoo, on the other hand, simply adds up the total number of links to your site and gives you "link love" according to how big the number is.
It's beyond the scope of this article to discuss link quality, but that's a topic you can easily learn about at wikipedia (search "link popularity")
My favorite (free!) link popularity check tool is marketleap.com. It not only gives you your total link count, but it allows you to enter three competitive sites to see how your site compares.
CASE STUDY.
I go to marketleap.com and enter my URL: escapethematrix.net
In the comparison box I'll use these three sites:
ericworre.com
randygage.com
betternetworker.com
The first two are sites by well respected guru's in the industry, the third is a network marketing web 2.0 site.
Here's the results (just the totals):
ericworre.com 4
betternetworker.com 140
randygage.com 143
escapethematrix.net 915
So I not only see exactly how many links I have coming into my site, but how it compares to other sites in my niche.
So go to marketleap.com, enter your URL, and voila! You'll see right away exactly how many links your site has compared to others in your niche, and it won't cost you a dime.
Dave Sherwin is an online network marketing expert who won the "Rookie Of The Year" award in his network marketing company. He is also the co-founder of the Lighthouse Marketing System. To learn more about making money with blogging, visit: escapethematrix.net/4thpillar.