Link Popularity and Google PageRank

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.

Comments

One Response to “Link Popularity and Google PageRank”

  1. » Link Popularity and Google PageRank Explained on February 21st, 2007 6:27 am

    [...] Original post by Gordon Choi and software by Elliott [...]

Leave your comments

  • Your first comment will be reviewed before getting posted.
  • Your subsequent comments will be posted without review.
  • All spammy comments will be deleted.