Link popularity measures how popular your site is on the internet. The more sites link to you, the more popular your site is. Link popularity has become one of the important factors for search engines to rank your site.

In earlier days, there were few search engines. Among them, Alta Vista and Fast (also called alltheweb) are the two leading engines. Both of them use content relevancy to determine site rankings. The search results displaying before the users are highly relevant and they deemed it as the sources for surfing on the internet. However, when search engine optimization companies use meta tag and text with rich keywords, their sites soon climbed to best rankings. As a result, the internet users are becoming dissatisfied with the search results.

To fight against SEOs, search engines work on more algorithms to rank sites. The most important is to use link popularity as a key factor to rank site. That means, meta tag creation and content rewriting are simply not enough. To get a better position, your site should be "popular" on the internet. You can add or delete any word on your site, but you have no control on others' site. This is why the link popularity is an effective factor that now nearly all search engines put significant weight on it.

Among all the major search engines, Google is the only one who special caliber to measure how many sites link to you - PageRank or known as PR. The highest Pagerank is 10, and the lowest is o. Few websites get a PR of 10. They are Yahoo, Adobe, and Google itself. Worldwide portal sites, such as MSN are assigned a PR of 9. New sites or sites that have been indexed by Google are automatically assigned a PR of 0. The more site link to you, the bigger the number is.

Definitely, SEOs have their new ways to become "popular", and thus achieve high rankings. That is, to exchange link with other sites or even buy links (trade link) from other sites. Then, reciprocal link comes out as a way to improve link popularity.