Link popularity
Link popularity is an estimate of a page’s importance based on the number and quality of links it receives from other sites
What it means, how it is used and where it comes up, with its related concepts.
What it is and how it works
It was one of the first criteria search engines used to rank results, on the basis that each link acts as a recommendation. Google formalised it with the PageRank algorithm, which gives more weight to links from pages that are themselves important.
The term is little used today: search engines combine links with many other signals, such as content relevance, search intent and page experience, and they discount or neutralise artificial links. The authority scores offered by third-party tools are each provider’s own approximations, not the values Google uses.
Also known as
Web popularity
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