Link Popularity has been the talk of the webmaster community for years.

You must be wondering why link popularity is so popular! I am going to explain it with some real life examples so to give a true understanding.

Link popularity can be explained simply as the total number of links pointing to your site. But, bare in mind that link popularity is not all about quantity. It is a mix between quantity and quality.

Step 1
Suppose a patient wants to channel a best doctor from his local area. The first factor they will consider is the qualifications of the doctor. Suppose the patient finds several doctors who are qualified. How will the patient now choose the best doctor?

We can apply same theory for search engines. This is like on-page optimisation of your website. Doctors should have basic qualifications. Likewise your website should have basic qualifications to get indexed and ranked.

If a search engine finds several websites with the same type of content, service and on-page optimisation, how then will the search engines determine the best one?

Step 2
Now the patient needs to take advice from others, get reviews and recommendations.

Option 1
Suppose a professor who has a good name in medical industry recommends doctor “A” as the best doctor. Its a strong motivation for the patient to select doctor “A”.

Option 2
Suppose a few patients who were already treated by doctor “A” recommend him. It is also a strong motivation to choose doctor “A”.

Option 3
Suppose one patient who was already treated by doctor “A” recommends him. It is also a motivation to choose doctor “A”. But it is less powerful than option 1 and 2.

Option 3
Suppose a few people who know doctor “A” recommend him. It will also help to select doctor “A”. But it is less powerful than option 1, 2 and 3.

Now you can see there are different types of recommendations for doctor “A”. Some are stronger motives while others are weaker motives. But all of them helps to choose doctor “A”.

We can apply the same theory for search engines. Search engines will appreciate high quality, authority links to your site the most. Then they will favour related links followed by unrelated links in descending order.

As a summary, you can see any link will help your site. If you do not have high quality authority links pointing to your site, some less quality relevant links may help you to get the same rank. If you do not have few related links, more and more high quality unrelated links may help you fill the gap.

This article was written for us by an SEO consultant who runs an affordable one way links building service.

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1. Link Building Methods, Link Popularity, Backlinks
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3. Link Popularity
4. Link Development
5. Link Building not just for Google