Are link popularity guidelines in the mayor search engines about to change? Are website owners prepared for this?

Analyzing link popularity and its evolution it can suspected that another step further into its evolution for better search results might be on the drawing board on some of the most important search engines. If not, it will probably be soon. However this will not come as happy news for many website owners that have invested a lot of their time and effort, not to mention money, mostly, if not solely, in link exchanges for the purpose of increasing their link popularity. Link exchange service providers wont be too happy either.

(PRWEB) September 25, 2004 - What could be this next big step? - some may ask

Before this question can be answered, people need to understand how anyone can come to this conclusion in the first place in order to fully understand it.

In order to provide their users better quality search results and keep their own resources from getting exhausted, search engines needed to put a stop, or at least slow down the use of doorway pages and link farms, among other techniques that they now consider spam. As a penalty they either lower their rank or in the worst of cases, ban them completely.

Search engine technology is becoming more complex and sophisticated every day due to advances in technology and also because since they are receiving an ever increasing amount of listing requests they need to keep up with this demand. Due to the large amount of these requests and their bulging data bases, they need to get even more discriminating than ever before when they rank a web page. Ranking determines in the search results which are the most relevant and important pages to show first, second, third and so on, up to the last page. A page will be rewarded" because of its relevancy to the search term in a query (inquire) and importance will be according to some factors including amount of content pages and most importantly, link popularity.

Link popularity used to be determined only by how popular a website was or how many back links it had. Not anymore. Now relevancy" have been added to the linking equation.

Whats next? How about link exchanges are not and will not be taken into account for increasing or even influencing link popularity"? Why not? Whats wrong with an innocent link exchange? ....some might ask.

Link exchanges - How innocent are them in reality?

Link exchanges are done for two basic reasons: traffic and link popularity. Naturally there is nothing wrong with getting visitors from other websites by exchanging links. Also, if other websites recommend a website by linking to it, that makes a site popular. That means that the website in question is, at the very least, worth looking at. BUT can people honestly say that a website is popular because other websites have links pointing to that site and as a fair exchange the site is ALSO linking to them? Are both the website in question and the others really linking to each other because all these websites have great or excellent content? Anyone can figure out that the answer is a resounding NO.

If people look at this in an objective fashion, they can easily figure out that the website have been made popular by artificial means, by plotting" with other websites to get an advantage and not by the real value of the websites content. And here is where the whole problem is at.

If other websites link to a website and they are not asking for a link in return that means that the website must have something that they consider valuable. This is true link popularity. But if the favor have to be returned in order to keep the link in their sites, they do not consider the website of much value, just their link in the site. However for now this is being considered link popularity... but for how much longer?

If search engines want to show in their search results websites that are relevant and also popular for their own true value - they will still need to check to see how many back links they have and disregard those that are also getting a link back to them. These links cannot prove that these websites are linking to a specific site because they think that it has good or excellent content but because they want to take advantage of this search engine algorithm loophole. They will still get the traffic from the link exchanges but not the popularity status from them.

If this come to pass, and it is believed that it will, sooner or latter, there will be many websites affected by this. Only those that get prepared will not suffer the consequences and will actually gain a lot from the change.

Who is to gain the most from this next step in the link popularity saga? The web searcher since he or she will be able to find a lot of content that other websites truly consider to be very valuable. As a side effect, website owners will see the need to make their websites look more professional and with more and better content in order to gain popularity by getting linked from other sites..

Spammers who may still want to trick the search engines instead of doing the right thing, will make arrangements with other websites in order to try to hide their link exchange schemes. Website A will link to B. B will link to C and C will link to A, closing the loop. When search engines begin spotting this and not taking them into account for link popularity, these websites will turn around and will probably make a bigger loop with ABCDE and F in order to keep from being spotted. However the more websites that are introduced into this loop, more will be the risk of getting the loop broken somewhere and eventually disappearing completely. Eventually it will be much easier and less complex to simply make better websites and forget about cheating the search engines in order to gain link popularity.

If search engines want to offer optimum search results, they will have to make some radical changes that will affect many people in Internet related industries in one way or another. When this come to pass there will be some winners (those that were prepared) but also some losers...

Getting prepared

Anyone wanting to be prepared for these changes must start getting one way links soon for his or her site, which, by the way, are more permanent than links from link exchanges.

How can webmasters get one way links?

1- Adding the URL to the directories, under the category related to the website topic. Or better yet, to those directories that specialize in that specific topic.
2- Inviting website visitors to link to the site. They will if they want to connect to good page content for their visitors.
3- Sending e-mails to other sites with similar characteristics as the website in question and inviting them to link to the site.
4- Posting a free link demand in the Link Popularity Directory and inviting other webmasters browsing the directory to link to the website. They should be told what kind of content the website has. If they are interested, they will link to it.
5- Going to linkpopularitydirectory.com and getting more tips on getting even more one way links for their website(s).

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