For quite some time now, ‘link popularity’ and a pages’ ‘Google PageRank’ have been a topic of great discussion in the search engine optimization community. That said, defining link popularity and how it differs from a websites ‘Page Rank’ is not so easy. Further, to really get it, we need to examine how much of an effect these grades actually have on search engine rankings, and how a search engine optimization campaign is constructed, because their effects can be easily misunderstood.

What is Link Popularity?

The concept of link popularity is basically the following. The search engine overlords (google) have decided that if other sites are linking to your site, it must be an authority on the subject matter, therefore, its worthy of a boost in rankings. If you think about it at face value in theory it makes a lot of sense, because people link to good sites right? That is to say until every seo expert and search engine optimization campaign began making an obvious SEO promotion out of links, making them hold less water.

PageRank Does Not Equal Link Popularity

It’s important to recognize that Google Page Rank is not the same thing as link popularity. Page Rank is actually a subset of link popularity focusing specifically on the quantity and popularity of links, link popularity adds a “quality control” factor into the equation. Unfortunately, many people mistakenly use the terms “link popularity” and “PageRank ” interchangeably, which has served to confuse the issue further.