Is Link Popularity For Real?

Author: Alyice Edrich

Link popularity is a term used to describe how many other websites are linked to one particular website. In other words, the popularity of the site is based on how many incoming links it receives.

A few years back, swapping links was key to showing search engines that your website was worthy of visiting and gaining higher ranks in the search engines. The more websites linking to your website, the more “valuable” your website was—thus, the creation of “link popularity”.

Link Swaps Aren't The Answer

But as time passed, link pages became nothing more than glorified spam pages. Link pages no longer held relevant information related to the topic of the website it was linked on; instead these pages contained hundreds, if not thousands of links to useless or irrelevant information. And those looking to manipulate the search engines began to use Free For All (FFA) link pages and specially designed software programs to increase their rankings in the search engines.

Have you been wasting your time searching the Internet for “qualified” websites to swap links with? How have your efforts helped you in ranking higher in the search engines? What about bringing targeted traffic to your website? How about an increase in traffic?

If you’ve spent the last six to twelve months asking other website owners to swap links with your website, but haven’t seen any results, you could feel as though you’ve wasted both your time and your money. I know I did!

When I first developed my website, I spent hundreds of hours looking for websites that related to my website’s theme. While I do believe it’s a great way to start bringing traffic to your website, it isn’t the best tactic for developing a constant stream of visitors and to be honest, that was my intention.

I would first send a letter of request to swap links with the owner of a particular website, and then I would use the Google toolbar to find out what other websites were linking to that particular website. Then I would send an email every owner of those websites and ask the owners to consider swapping links with me, too.

My letter went something like this,

Dear (Name of website owner),

I found your website on the Internet and believe it would be the perfect candidate to swap links with.

Would you be interested in recommending my site to your visitors via your links page? (Or whatever name that website owner gave his/her links page. i.e. recommendation, link partners, sponsors, etc.) And in exchange, I will refer you to my visitors.

You can visit my links page at: http://thedabblingmum.com/links.htm

For your convenience, I’ve included a brief description of my website for your links page.

The Dabbling Mum™ is a national publication for BUSY Parents with centers in home business, Christianity, parenting, writing, book reviews, contests, and yes, even e-books! Subscribe to free newsletter. Click here: http://thedabblingmum.com

Sincerely,

Alyice Edrich
Website Owner

What I found, however, was that less than 5% of the websites I contacted even swapped links with me. It was frustrating, time consuming, and humiliating. So I stopped requesting link swaps and found more productive ways to use my time.

Build Links Outside Of Link Farms

The moment I stopped concentrating on finding “qualified” websites to swap links with and concentrated my efforts on more important tasks, such as writing and buying quality content, marketing and promoting my website through traditional means, and developing articles for the explicit purpose building outside links, my traffic began to increase on its own.

Instead of spending all your energy, money, resources, and/or time hunting down websites to swap links with, use your time more productively.

Here are a few tips to help you increase your website’s traffic with link popularity:

Offer quality content on your own website. Content that relates to the theme of your business will often get linked to by other websites without your asking.
Write articles about your business, or on topic related to your business, and distribute your articles to other websites and/or e-zines.
Submit your website to search engines, such as Google.
Submit your website to directories, such as DMOZ.org.
Submit your e-zine to directories that list newsletters, such as The Free Directory of Ezines.
If you must link to someone, do so based on the fact that the other website relates to your website’s theme, not because of a simple exchange of links.

Finally, don't:

Pay to get linked on another website, but do pay for advertisements.
Host link pages off your main website.
Link to Free For All (FFA) link farms.
Accept swaps with those who will place your link on a FFA links page.
Link to websites that do not relate to your website’s theme, unless it’s in the byline of an article.
Use submission software programs.
Spam others by sending your website’s address (link) to thousands of unwilling participants.