I was told link popularity is the number one criterion used by the top search engines to rank sites. As a webmaster for my own website as well as sites that belong to my customers, I am now doing the following two things to boost link popularity:

i) I have joined several popularity farms like LinksToYou.com, in the hope that hundreds of other sites will point to each of my sites.

ii) For my benefit alone, I create links to my home site on each page on all my customers' sites.

Please let me know what I am doing right or wrong and tell me what else I can do to boost link popularity.

Jim Wood


Answer:

Hi Jim,

While link popularity may not be the number one criterion for ranking sites, it is definitely an extremely important criterion. However, the methods that you are using are not the ones I would recommend.

The first method that you are using may actually backfire on you. Of late, Google has been banning sites which are members of link farms. The reason is simple - Google's algorithm depends to a large extent on link popularity. Hence, any product or service which can artificially boost the link popularity of sites can wreak havoc on Google's ability to rank the most relevant sites first. Thus, it is perfectly logical for Google to start banning sites which are members of such link farms. Furthermore, there are several other problems associated with such link farms:

i) They generally require you to add a visible graphical or text link from the home page of your site to the page in your site which contains the links to the other sites. This means that there is every possibility that one of your visitors may see the pages containing the links. How would you like it if they saw one of your competitors or an adult site at the top of this page?

ii) Many of these link farms give the same pages to all their members, i.e. the pages that you have to upload to your site are no different from the pages that I have to upload to my site. Many search engines detect such duplicate pages in multiple domains and may penalize these domains for spamming.

iii) These link farms link each member's site with the sites of all the members. This means that you will get a lot of links that are completely unrelated to your site. Unrelated links are not as valuable as links from related sites.

Now, with regard to your second method, while it doesn't have most of the problems associated with the first method, it is not something that your customers may actually like. For instance, when we optimize a client's web site, we could add links to our site from the pages that we create for our client. However, we don't do it because it is not in the best interest of our clients.

Now, even if your clients do not mind your adding the link, this method still suffers from the third drawback associated with the first method. Your clients' sites are most probably unrelated to your site. As I mentioned, links from unrelated sites are simply not as valuable as links from related sites.

You don't really need to use these methods to boost your link popularity. There are lots of legitimate, effective, and less risky ways by which you can improve the link popularity of your site. For a detailed description of all these methods, see my article on link popularity.


QUESTION 2:

My site is in a niche area and there aren't too many other sites in this field. Whenever someone types in my most important keyword in Yahoo!, only 3 other sites come up in Yahoo!'s Web Sites section. Now, I am ranked no. 1 in Google for that keyword and hence, I am also ranked no. 1 in Yahoo!'s Web Pages section. Do you think it is still worthwhile for me to spend the $199 for Yahoo!'s Business Express program?

Jeremy Olsen


Answer:

Hi Jeremy,

Yes, I think it is still worthwhile for you to pay $199 to Yahoo!. This is because of 3 reasons:

i) Yahoo! first displays the Web Sites section (which consists of sites present in Yahoo!'s directory), and then provides a link which takes people to the Web Pages section (which contains sites from Google). Now, look at this from the point of view of people who have searched for the keyword. A certain percentage of them (generally those who are new to the Internet in general or Yahoo! in particular) will not be aware of the fact that they can find more results in the Web Pages section. Hence, they won't click on to the Web Pages section and will restrict themselves to the 3 sites that Yahoo! has displayed in the Web Sites section. Thus, even though you are no. 1 in the Web Pages section, you may be loosing a large percentage of the traffic from Yahoo! that you could have got had you been listed in the Web Sites section.

ii) Secondly, a certain percentage of Yahoo!'s visitors do not use its Search feature. Instead, when they want to find some information, they browse around Yahoo!'s directory going from category to category. If you are not listed in Yahoo!'s directory, you will obviously not be able to attract such visitors into your site.

iii) Thirdly, a listing in Yahoo! improves the link popularity of your site. Link popularity has become an increasingly important factor as far as the ranking of your site in the search engines is concerned. Now, what is important is not only the number of links to your site, but also the quality of the links. Links from an "important" site add more to your link popularity score than links from less important sites. No link is as important as one from a large directory like Yahoo!. Hence, by getting your site listed in Yahoo!'s directory, you can actually improve the ranking of your site in the search engines.

Hence, for all these reasons, I still think it is worthwhile for you to get your site listed in Yahoo! by paying $199. In order to see how you can get the best possible listing in Yahoo!, see my article on submitting your site to Yahoo!.


QUESTION 3:

Recently, I was doing some research on which of my competitors were ranked well for my keywords. I found that there was a particular page in one site which was ranked in the top 10 in AltaVista, Google, Excite and quite a few of the other engines for my most important keyword. However, while the Title tag of the page contained the keyword, the keyword wasn't present anywhere else in the page. Can you explain how this site managed to do well in the search engines without having keywords in the body of the page?

Andrei Vishnayev


Answer:

Hi Andrei,

That site has probably used a technique called page cloaking. This allows it to show one page to its human visitors and one page to the search engines. The page which was shown to the search engines must have contained the keywords throughout the page. However, since the page which was shown to you (i.e. the one meant for human visitors) is not going to be shown to the search engines, it need not contain the keyword. You can learn more about what page cloaking means by reading my article on this topic.

My advice to you is to not give in to the temptation of using page cloaking just because one of your competitors is currently getting good results by using it. Sure, the site may be doing well now. But will it be in the top 10 in the engines 6 months from now? I can almost guarantee that it won't. The search engines do not like sites which use page cloaking because it prevents them from being able to index the same content that their visitors are going to see. And if they find that a particular site has used cloaking, it may ban that site forever from their index. Do you want to risk that?

Sites generally use page cloaking when they find that they can't create a page which the search engines like and which also looks pleasing to the human eye. However, it is possible to create a page which is optimized for the search engines and also looks good to humans. Sure, it takes a lot more hard work - but it can be done. And doing so will ensure that your site gets a top ranking in the search engines not only today but also in the future.