Major search engines consider link popularity as one of the key factors in ranking a website. At least one major engine even claims they won't index sites that don't have at least one link pointing to them from another site. Many online marketing specialists believe that link popularity is simply obtaining as many links as possible. However, the quality of the link holds more weight than the quantity of links. You will get better results in the search engines if you have link popularity from sites that have considerable traffic.

Obtaining links from other web sites is not enough to obtain long-term results on both the search engines and directories. People have to actually click on those links to your web site and browse your web site. More importantly they need to return to your web site when they see the quality content, products, and/or services that you offer, i.e. the usability of your web site.

As the importance of linking grew people began to look for short-cuts to link popularity. There’s a right and a wrong way to create backlinks, and short-cuts to link popularity can cause severe trouble for a website to be ranked. One solid example of this type of short-cut is the use of link farms that provide hundreds of irrelevant links. Link farm is a network of sites that link to other sites for the sole purpose of increasing their link popularity. Your website gets hundreds of links to your site from all unrelated sites and in return, you must link to hundreds of other unrelated sites. Google terms it as spamming and removes sites from its index related with link farms.

Therefore link popularity should be developed the right way and in the right direction. Your website should link to information that interests your visitors and increase their knowledge in topics related to your business. Many webmasters ignore this very rewarding process because of shortage of time because they just don’t have the time. Having another site linked to yours is almost vital when it comes to getting your site indexed.