Ranking Factors for SEO - Link Popularity

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Your PageRank measurement is based on the distribution of links to your domain from around the web. Quality links matter the most. The more decent links you have, the better. Look at Wikipedia and About.com. Many of the well-ranking pages have few links, but rank purely on the domain's link power.

I believe link popularity (or link authority) is the most important ranking factor in Google. Once you have link popularity on a domain, you can easily rank for medium competitive terms with no or few links, while less authoritative sites have to do much more work.

Anchor Text of Inbound Links

If you don't know what anchor text is, click the link and learn.

Anchor text is one of the most important items to work on in search engine optimization. The anchor text of external links leading into your pages is the biggest indicator of what your website is about. If you want to rank for "grey dogs," then make sure that outside and internal links have "grey dogs" in their anchor text.

Google has also moved away from pure anchor text to authority links from power domains. A generic link from a highly authoritative PR 8 site, with nothing but the address as the anchor text, and a page title related to your targeted keyword may be more valuable than 10 keyword-rich links from low quality directories.

Anchor text can also hurt you if you do not vary it. For example, if you get 100 links, all with "grey dogs" as the anchor text, this will set off red flags. Varying the anchor text to appear more natural is very important.

Age of Link

The older the link the better, just like your domain.

New links need to age several months before they start passing value. This may be part of Google's algorithms to fight spam. If a link survives for a certain period of time, then it's a good indicator that the link is pretty decent.

Many SEOs think of aged links like wine; the older it is, the better.

Next: Text Around the Link >>
 

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