How To Increase Your Link Popularity

Almost every site needs to increase their link popularity.

How should you go about doing this without incurring the wrath of the search engines?

It's generally accepted that the more inbound links you have to your site, the better. But that's not the whole story. Some links are more equal than others. Generally, the more difficult it is to acquire the link, the higher importance the search engines will place on it. So a link from, say, the home page of CNN will likely be worth a lot more than a link from your granny's site that just displays pictures of her grandchildren.

Links from certain "bad neighborhoods" may even count against you. Sites that are deemed to be "link farms", created for the sole purpose of generating links are usually worth avoiding. Similarly, sites where you can add your link and it instantly appears (often called Free For All link sites) are usually bad news. They may have had their use a few years ago but they're no longer worth your time.

Link swapping, also known as reciprocal linking, is also being given less importance by the search engines. They figure that it's relatively easy to swap links, so they put two and two together and figure that these reciprocal links are also not worth too much.

Some directories are "good" to get links from. Places like the Open Directory and Yahoo's directory, where a human looks at your site and checks it over, are good places to get links from. Other directories, where you place a link back to them or pay a small fee of a few dollars, vary in quality. Install the Google toolbar to check the page rank of your proposed directory before submitting.

Find out more about how to increase your link popularity by getting this free link building report