Link popularity is increasingly recognised as an important part of any marketing plan. Search engines and speciality sites such as www.linkpopularity.com allow you to measure the link popularity of your site.

However, from my experience the ‘scores’ produced by these measurements need to be taken with a very large pinch of salt.

In this post, I want to give two examples of dodgy measurement, outline the real benefits of a linking strategy and stimulate some debate and feedback.

First, two examples from my own work of measurement gone wrong:

1. A major pharmaceutical site has over 5,500 inbound links to its site. But by analysing the nature of these links it turns out that corporate links (i.e. internal links from their own brand sites) made up 63% of these, pharmaceutical industry directories (mostly dull, low-traffic sites) made up another 14%, academic sites 12%, charity sites 5%, suppliers, 3% and others 13%. Indeed, just 1% of sites from our sample matched the type of link they were after.

2. A major entertainment site in the UK raised my eyebrows when it scored over 18,000 inbound links – 6 times more than its nearest rival. Such a disparity suggests something fishy is going on. Some basic detective work quickly uncovered the trick they were using and I was able to revise their score to a ‘genuine’ 900 or so.

Such examples probably arise from the need to boost search engine rankings and link popularity’s undoubted efficacy in doing so. These tactics, while they may be successful for a time, miss the point and demean the practice of building link popularity.

Second, the benefits of a linking strategy:

An effective linking strategy will take many days of effort over a period of months, but the benefits are well worth it. These include:

(i) Increases industry knowledge - finding out who links to you, who links to your competitors and identifying the major portals and ezines for your industry will not only identify linking opportunities but give you a tremendous view of your industry online.

(ii) Builds traffic - following a link is one of the most popular ways to find new sites. Research from AltaVista, Compaq and IBM shows that sites that are well-linked share high volumes of traffic.

(iii) Improves search engine rankings - most search engines now include link popularity in their algorithms and a proper linking strategies is one of the most legitimate ways of boosting your rankings.

(iv) Creates value for customers – site users love useful links. Sharing some or all of the information you collect while doing link research will provide great value for your site users.

(v) Builds Trust - links from respected industry sites will help small or new companies build trust.

(vi) Links attract links – sites that already have a high level inbound links of are most likely to attract further links. Growth can be exponential.

(vii) Builds community - most importantly, a well linked site becomes part of the informal but well-trafficked community around their industry.

Third, the stages involved:

These are:

(i) Analyse your current inbound links
(ii) Analyse your competitor’s inbound links – this will give you your first target list.
(iii) Find further sites that could link to you – this will give you your second target list
(iv) Make sure you have content that potential link targets will find attractive
(v) Set business objectives for your linking strategy
(vi) Make sure your site is link-friendly
(vii) Publish appropriate outbound links on your own site
(viii) Ask for inbound links
(ix) Monitor results and build on them.

I’ve conducted linking campaigns for major clients over the past two years and have sometimes been frustrated by their inability to grasp the real marketing potential of an effective linking strategy. So I’ve created a free site at www.linkingmatters.com to share knowledge and point to extensive resources on linking strategy.

E-consultancy has kindly agreed to host the 33-page report, Linking Matters.

I am working on a number of case studies and would be delighted to hear about other people’s experience in building inbound links – be they positive or negative.

Many thanks.

I've got just a couple of additions to your well informed comments...

>>1. A major pharmaceutical site has over 5,500 inbound
>>links to its site
>
>Most of them were internal, which makes sense. PR is
>calculated on a per page basis, not a per site basis
>(which leads to a couple of tactics to "pump" PR
>around a give site), and large sites, by the nature of the
>PR calculation will have more "natural" PR, and
>can generate a positive feedback loop effect. Add in a few
>good links from industry-speficic directories, suppliers
>and academia, and you're there

You're only "there" in terms of generating PR (Page Rank), and playing at the same games as SEO (search engine optimisers). The kind of links you want aren't only for PR, but for clickthrough traffic. It's the high-traffic health portals that the company really wants linking to them.

>Thus the <title>, <body> content (which
>includes the <h1>), and the anchor text (blue fuzzy
>widgets) are all related to widgets. That link will
>significantly boost the apparent quality of your site on
>the topic of widgets.

Increasingly this is the way search engines will go, not only looking at the anchor text, but also the title text, headings and finally, the entire body of the html page it finds the link on. If you look at http://www.linkingmatters.com you'll find all the relevent headings on a page are contained within <h1> through <h3> tags. The entire site is XHTML 1.1 Strict for the same reason. If the site is well coded it will be easier for search engines to correctly parse and understand.

Ultimately it all boils down to what hypertext is and should be. If search engine algorithms such as the one you describe are correctly implemented, and content providers and aggregators follow the spirit of hypertext and XML, search engines would be a lot better and content would be easier to find. All links (on site and off) should have relevent text describing their target contained inside them. For a good page on the topic of link text, look at http://www.w3.org/2001/06tips/noClickHere.

There are numerous technically orientated changes that can be made on a web page itself to help search engines and Page Rank. You can go as far as changing the order of elements within the html file, so relevent text sections come near the top, while navigation is near the bottom (though of course still keeping important internal links at the top).

But the strategy behind Linking Matters isn't related to either the quick fixes of SEO (gateway pages, meta-tag spamming and link farms), or to the common-sense standards compliance described above. These are all secondary to the idea of getting good links on high-traffic sites, and getting visitors through that, not through search engines. If you happen to get a high Page Rank by pursuing this strategy, all the better, and it shows search engines are doing what they are being designed to do, gather relevent content, but ultimately few businesses can rely purely on search engine referals to go about day to day business.

Well, there are couple of things that may well have contributed to this.

Firstly, and probably most importantly, I don't believe the number of sites relating to jobs in the autistic field is that large, so Google's PageRank will be increased; this generally applies to any niche topic, it's quite possible to have an extremely high PageRank in something that very few people deal cover on the web.

Looking at DMOZ, Autism Jobs has a good listing on http://dmoz.org/Health/Mental_Health/Disorders/Neurodevelopmental/Autism_Spectrum/Services/. Google definately puts some weight towards DMOZ listings, as well as the fact a lot of people use DMOZ data in other search engines and directories.

Backward links do look especially low for a page with such high PageRank, but at least two of the pages that link to it have a high PageRank themselves.

The domain name matches the topic extremely well, but as for whether the .org suffix helps at all, I'm not sure, but wouldn't rule it out.

As for the actual pages, having a good "about autismjobs" link on all pages, as well as the constant footer with it's internal links should help.

This is of course one of the most hotly contested areas presently.

The difficulty with links is not only the Google PR of the site from whom one has a link, but the actual link reference that is provided. How one is described in the link itself.
There are issues concerning IPR matters with linking. One cannot indiscriminately link as one wishes fherefore it is to be recommended that a clearly defined link policy be issued, preferably on ones site so that links accrued describe one's own site in the best manner, rather than merely company name.
This should be reflected in the title of ones own site, so that the circle may be squared.