Because of the Giant called Google's interest in link exchanging it has now become more and more important that webmasters assure themselves of a sound Link Popularity strategy.

Link popularity is an off-page criteria that the Search Engines are using more and more. Why is this? Because Lord Google made it important. Although inter-related, there are two main purposes for in-pointing links as far as the Search Engines are concerned:

1) To establish the credibility of the 'linked' site. An in-pointing link from a quality, related site tells the Search Engines that another Webmaster thinks highly enough of your site to link to it. In other words, the link counts as a vote of confidence. The more highly the Search Engines regard the site that provides the link, the more powerful that vote becomes.

Why should I care you ask. Because it's important just trust me. No no I'm just kidding. The reason is because until your site has established some link popularity, you may find yourself being dropped periodically from the various Search Engine databases. Sure, you'll get re-spidered and ranked, but the process is a frustrating one. Moreover, for those search engines you can't submit to, their crawlers must find and rank you independently. Unless they happen to find you by following a link from a site already on their radar, it may be a long time before you make it into their respective indices. In addition many people say that Google assigns you a rookie status when you are a new site and therefore only time will say when the behemoth notices you.

So quality links not only increase the chance of getting listed by Search Engines that do not offer a submission service, they ensure your site will stick in the databases of the ones that do.

Did you notice my careful use of the word QUALITY links? The only links that matter to you are links from quality sites with themes related to your business. For example, having a link from a mortgage site is a good thing if you have a real estate or financing site, but if you have a link from a gambling site this is not only irrelevant but might actually penalise you with Engines like Google. In order words don't just link to link make sure your links are credible like everything else in your business should be.

Ok I'm finally at:

2) As an off-page ranking criteria. Link popularity is an 'off-page' ranking criteria that the Search Engines are using more and more. It is not the dominant weighting factor for rankings, of course. Content on a page will always be the most important. In fact, although establishing link popularity for the sake of improving your rankings is still worth working on, you shouldn't lose any sleep about it. Why? Because most sites do not have many links to them at all. If all sites had hundreds of incoming links, link popularity would be weighted more heavily in the engines' ranking algorithms. But most sites just do not have that many incoming links -- if you weighted linking too heavily, you'd make 99% of the Net disappear.