popularity

Popularity Rating, often referred to as Link Popularity or PR

...is simply a count of links from other websites that point back to your website.  The assumption is that if a lot of websites point to your website – then your website must be more important than another, similar website with fewer links pointing to it.

In their simplest form, early indexing Robots would scan their indices for the number of external (other domain) links pointing back to the current site being indexed – and then assign ranking points (metaphorically speaking) based upon a pure count.

A word about “Link Popularity” and Popularity Ratings (“PR1” through “PR6”).

There is a population of website owners and web marketers who measure their “success” based upon how many external links they have pointing to their website(s).  Since external links are “good”, why not have as many external links from link partners and others as possible?  Many of these web marketers sell listings on their sites for a monthly or annual fee.  In return, they provide links from one or more websites in their network pointing back to your site.  Their only requirement is the fee and, in some cases, a link or links from your site pointing back to them.  Essentially, they are in the “links for sale” business as opposed to being in a core product or service business that relates directly or indirectly to your business.  Oftentimes, though not always – they will target one or two specific industries.

A system of Popularity Rankings have evolved that provides these web marketers with the metrics to measure their “success” with software that performs “link counts” at all the major search engines.  Depending upon the aggregate link count, a website is then assigned a “PR” value of 1 to 6.  These rankings are bantered about as a “PR5” or “PR6” (being the highest) in their sales hype and are presumed to be a measure of the success they can add to your website.

While NetPath SEO supports the value of “more is good” in the links area, the factors and criteria covered on our “link partners” page still apply.  If you are engaged with a SEM (Search Engine Marketing) firm – have them verify the validity of any PR claims by “PR Networks” and then evaluate the relevancy of each website to your website in that marketer’s network.  A good “value test” that you can perform yourself is to see how well some of the “PR Network” websites perform when you enter your target terms or phrases in one of the primary search engines.

The Crawlers in use today are considerably more sophisticated than those of the late 1990s – and are designed to determine the relevancy of referring sites to the content of the site currently being indexed (the “target site”).  This refinement came about largely as a result of “link farms” like the ones above – websites whose only business was to provide links back to their client (target) sites.  This form of spamming would often position poorly written sites near the top of search results in the early days – thereby creating an unsatisfactory experience for the search engine user and damaging the reputation (for accuracy) of the Search Engine..

Today, the better Crawlers first determine the purpose of the site being indexed and then use tables of predetermined site categories that are considered relevant to the site.  Then, when scanning the master index for links pointing back to the current (target) site – links that come from site categories deemed to be relevant are assigned a higher ranking value then other, “non relevant” links.  In addition, some search engine indexing robots will evaluate the text immediately surrounding the referring link to look for relevancy reinforcement in what we call the anchor text – the text that anchors the referring link on the external (referring) website.  If you look at the “links” page on some of our client sites and then study the websites they point to, you’ll get a feel for how we do this.  Talk with your SEO counselor for guidance and the names of some of our portfolio sites.