Link Popularity Checker
Use the tool below to check the number of backlinks to your website.
About This Tool
Everyone wants to be popular. And every business wants their website to be popular too. By building up links to other sites, you can raise your profile and incorporate an effective link strategy into your search engine optimization (SEO). But how can you increase your site visibility and build up those all-important links?
Link popularity is the total number of websites that link to your own site. How many backlinks you have to your site will go towards determining your PageRank with the major search engines, along with other off-page criteria such as anchor text and keywords. Most of the major search engines factor link popularity into their relevancy algorithms. Therefore, increasing the number of quality, relevant sites that link to your site can improve your search engine ranking, moving your site higher up the listings. By giving your site this raised profile, you can begin to establish it as a credible source. As your site becomes more high profile, the engines will include it as a quality link when they check back links for other sites. It’s a self-perpetuating tool that, although may take a little time to build, pays dividends through increased exposure, and so increased potential business.
Quality vs Quantity
The common opinion is that quantity is key when it comes to the number of backlinks to your site. But it’s also crucial to remember that quality is equally as important. A backlink from an irrelevant or even a disreputable site can damage your own site’s reputation with the search engines. This is where a link popularity checker starts to come into its own.
A link popularity checker is a useful piece of software freely available from most of the major search engines as well as countless other freeware sites on the Internet. Link popularity checkers work very simply. By typing your URL address into the checker, you can bring up a list of the sites already linked to your own website, calculating how many backlinks you already have and of what quality and relevance they are to your business. Link popularity checkers will list how many links have already been ‘noticed’ by the major search engines, particularly Google, Yahoo!, MSN, Altavista, Alltheweb and Hotbot.
The web, by its very nature, is based on hyperlinks. The greater the number of relevant links, the more gravitas the site has amongst the search engines. Important, high-quality sites receive a higher PageRank, which Google in particular remembers each time it conducts a search. However, important pages, boosted by how many backlinks the page has to it, are worse than useless if they have no relevance to you and don’t match your query. So Google combines PageRank with text-matching techniques to find pages that are relevant and important on their lists.
To negate the number of non-relevant links that may want to establish contact with your site, some link popularity checkers also incorporate a robots.txt file. This is an exclusion file that contains specific instructions for search engine robots. It gives them a list of content that they are not allowed to index. Links placed on a page that the robots would discount on a normal crawl would not be of benefit to your site. Again, by incorporating a feature like this into a link popularity checker would mean that you would be able to check back links and filter out erroneous ones that have no relevance to your site or your business. Once again, quality, not quantity is the key.
How Many Links Does a Website Need?
However, to raise the profile of your site, you do need to perpetuate a growth of backlinks on a continuous basis. How many backlinks, though, is the big question. The best way to estimate how many backlinks you actually need to increase your site’s profile is to check back links of your top competitors. Note how many backlinks they have (concentrating here on the quantity, and not how many link exchanges they may have made). This will give you a rough guideline as to how many you need to cultivate to rank alongside them in the listings. Again, this exercise can be done easily by using a link popularity checker. By typing the URL of your competitor into the checker and starting to regularly check back links to their site, you can quickly learn how popular this particular kid on the block is. By then using other SEO techniques, such as examining the body text and the use of keywords, you can begin to understand what makes their site so successful and attractive, both to readers and to the spiders that crawl the pages.
The value your web page gets from a linking page is equal to the total PageRank value of that page, divided by the total number of outgoing links on that page. Getting a link from a PR4 page that has only 20 links is better than from one that has 50. The higher the PageRank value of the link page, the greater its value to your own page.
Checking the Quality of Backlinks
There are some important parameters to consider when building up your backlinks. How many backlinks a page has is irrelevant if the content has no interest to readers or if the backlinks are irrelevant too. Search engines give high priority to links pointing to your site from related industry pages as opposed to those from non-related industries. Check back links to ensure that they will direct the kind of traffic you actually need to your site. An algorithm used by the engines called ‘applied semantics’ will determine the industry relevance of a page within a site. If the link to your page is from your specific business arena, then you are more likely to draw benefit from the link. Again, it’s not how many backlinks you have, but the quality of those links.
Check back links to see if the anchor text keywords correspond to those that are relevant to you, and that they appear in the text from the link pointing to your site. Try also to check back links that will link you to partners who already appear in indexed pages on Google and Yahoo!. Search engines are likely to detect your link more quickly on a page that already exists in their indexes.
By utilising a link popularity checker to examine how many backlinks there are to your site, you can plan your SEO to incorporate this particular strategy. Check back links on a regular basis – it is a continuous process and not a case of resting on your laurels after the initial check. Also remember to check back links of sites that are of relevance to your industry or business. Link popularity checkers are widely available on the Internet, with Google, Yahoo! and all of the other major search engines providing good quality link popularity checkers.
At SEO Consult, we understand the importance of an holistic approach to SEO, and our own link popularity checker gives you the opportunity to check backlinks easily and quickly. A consultation with our experts can then help you to develop this information and integrate it into an effective SEO development tool for your business. Contact Us to find out more.
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