Link Popularity Building helps your website gain PageRank. A higher PageRank enables your site to rank higher in Search Engines with competitive keywords. The theory goes something like this: The search engine powers-that-be, have decided that if other sites are linking to your site, it must be a winner, therefore, it deserves a boost in rankings (when all else is equal). If you think about it, this makes a lot of sense. People link to good sites, not bad ones.

More and more major search engines, including Google, Yahoo, MSN, Ask Jeeves, AltaVista etc. are known to place some emphasis on off-page factors such as Link Popularity in their ranking algorithms to determine how important your site is in order to rank it high.

Some people believe that the number of sites pointing to their own site is what determines your link popularity, and the more links there are, the higher their own ranking will be. However, that is only partially true and can lead into a trap.

The search engines - and those that program the search engine algorithms - are not stupid. They are used to search engine spammers trying to cheat their way into getting a high ranking. Because of this, the search engines are not just looking for the number of links that point to a site ... most important is the quality of those links. It is important to understand that all links are not created equal. The search engines evaluate the incoming links on various parameters to determine the value of each site linking to you. Some important aspects which search engines evaluate are