Link Popularity and Google PageRank Explained
When it comes to SEO, there are link popularity and Google PageRank. Many SEO outsiders often are confused by the differences between link popularity and PageRank.
Link popularity is the quantity and quality of links pointing to your website from other websites on the Internet. When many other websites link to your website, search engines (such as Google) regard your website important and rank it higher in the search engine result pages (SERP). Obviously, Link Popularity is an off-page factor in SEO.
PageRank as it is defined by Google,
PageRank is a system for ranking web pages developed by our founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin at Stanford University. PageRank continues to provide the basis for all of our web search tools.
PageRank relies on the uniquely democratic nature of the web by using its vast link structure as an indicator of an individual page’s value. Google interprets a link from page A to page B as a vote, by page A, for page B. But, Google looks at more than the sheer volume of votes, or links a page receives; it also analyzes the page that casts the vote. Votes cast by pages that are themselves important weigh more heavily and help to make other pages important.
Important, high-quality sites receive a higher PageRank, which Google remembers each time it conducts a search. Important pages mean nothing to you if they don’t match your query. Google combines PageRank with sophisticated text-matching techniques to find pages that are both important and relevant to your search. Google goes far beyond the number of times a term appears on a page and examines all aspects of the page’s content and the content of the pages linking to it to determine if it’s a good match for your query.
PageRank is a value that is being continuously computed over time and is placed on a scale from 1 to 10. You can find more about PageRank on one of my previous posts (Matt Cutts Explaining Google PageRank).
One of the most important aspects in SEO today is the building of link popularity. This off-page factor together with PageRank and anchor text in incoming links determines your website’s ranking in the SERP.
As Google considers your website more important if there are higher quality and higher quantity of links pointing to your website, building link popularity improves the PageRank of your web pages. The higher the PageRank of your website, the more important your web pages to Google and the higher your web pages will rank in the SERP.
Google also takes into account the PageRank of the pages that link to your site and its industry relevance to your own industry. Links from web pages that have higher PageRank and are within relevant industry to your website eventually give your site higher importance.
Posted in: Google, Link Building, SEO
[...] Original post by Gordon Choi and software by Elliott [...]
[...] Link popularity is the fundamental concept of how major search engines rank sites in their SERP. This led to the abuse of this concept by the so-called link spammers in which blog comments are mostly targeted. To prevent the abuse, just over two years ago Google introduced the nofollow attribute. This is what Matt Cutts explained about it, The rel=â€nofollow†attribute is an easy way for a website to tell search engines that the website can’t or doesn’t want to vouch for a link. The best-known use for nofollow is blog comment spam, but the mechanism is completely general. Nofollow is recommended anywhere that links can’t be vouched for. If your logs analysis program shows referrers as hyperlinks, I’d recommend using nofollow on those links. If you have a wiki that anyone on the web can edit, I’d recommend nofollow on those links until you can find a way to trust those links. In general, if you have an application that allows others to add links, web spammers will eventually find your pages and start annoying you. [...]
[...] PageRank is rather a famous quality of Google on the organic search engine optimization. Although it is not absolutely certain, web pages or websites with higher PageRank values are often ranked higher in Google’s search engine result pages (SERP). [...]