Link popularity is one of the most crucial factor used by Yahoo
and Google to indicates how important your web document is. The
higher it is the better search engine result it will achive.
Link popularity is a measure of the quantity
and quality of other web sites that link to a specific site
on the World Wide Web. It is an example of the move by search
engines towards off-the-page-criteria to determine quality content.
In theory, off-the-page-criteria adds the aspect of impartiality
to search engine rankings.
Link popularity plays an important role in the visibility
of a web site among the top of the search results. Indeed, some
search engines require at least one or more links coming to
a web site, otherwise they will drop it from their index.
Search engines such as Google use a special link analysis
system to rank web pages. Citations from other WWW authors help
to define a site's reputation. The philosophy of link popularity
is that important sites will attract many links. Content-poor
sites will have difficulty attracting any links. Link popularity
assumes that not all incoming links are equal, as an inbound
link from a major directory carries more weight than an inbound
link from an obscure personal home page. In other words, the
quality of incoming links counts more than sheer numbers of
them.
