Link popularity is the measurement of both the quantity and quality of links found on other websites pointing to your website. Improved link popularity can have a drastic result on your rankings. In fact, the more competitive your industry is, the more link popularity becomes the deciding factor. Most of the major search engines today consider incoming links as a voting process. Having too many “outgoing” links on your website can reverse this voting process. Thus, the old idea of reciprocating links (i.e. giving away a vote to receive a vote) does little to help your rankings.

It is not only the number of incoming links, but more important, the quality (as perceived by the search engines) of the websites that are linking to you. For example, a text link from cnn.com would be worth more than a thousand text links from small, unknown websites. The more quality, relevant incoming text links you have, the higher the search engines will rank your website.