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Link Popularity
All of the major search engines place major significance on how many other websites link to yours.
This is called link popularity, and it is regarded by many as one of the most important metrics used by search engines. The higher your website's link popularity, the higher your site can appear on search engines.
You can increase your site's link popularity by increasing the number of sites that link to your website.
There are services that can help you increase your link popularity.
To increase your link popularity yourself, request links whenever possible. Some possible resources could be family, friends, clients, suppliers, and/or partners.
Be careful of the quality of the sites where you request links. Having a link from some sites can cause your site to be de-listed.
Google PageRank
Google PageRank (PR) is one of Google's measurements of how important your website is. Your PR is very closely related to your link popularity. It is an exponential scale, so a PR of 10 is not 10 times that of a PR of 1, but instead may exceed a million times higher ranking.
How important is this to you?
Fairly recently this was of critical importance, but as the Internet has evolved and spammers have found ways to subvert the intent of PR, the importance of PR has decreased. Some experts still feel it is extremely important, but many others feel that on a cost-per-time or money-spent basis, there are many more effective strategies available.
One key thing to note however, is that Google PR is a multiplier. As a result, although it's debatable how much more important a PR of 5 is over a PR of 1, a PR of zero is fatal, since anything multiplied by zero is zero.
Recommendations
Stay away from link farms. These are sites that list any and all links, accept automated submissions, and where there is little or no other content on the site. Getting a listing on a site such as this can actually cause your site to be delisted, since many top engines regard these as sources of non-email spam. In fact, providing your email address to a site such as this often results in your email address being sold to spammers, so you could also say that they can be an excellent source of email spam as well.
If you're using an automated submission tool such as SubmitWolf you may find yourself listed on link farms, so we recommend avoiding these tools as well. Additionally, there is little or no benefit to using these tools, and many people who do suddenly find themselves deluged with spam.
We recommend that you look primarily at link popularity as a tool to drive actual traffic to your website and secondarily as a means to increase search engine visibility. This means that you should look for relevant sites to link from, such as those in a complementary industry or from suppliers or associations in your industry. Coincidentally, these quality links are also the ones that Google places the highest value on, so you an see a double benefit by following this strategy.
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