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Search Engine Basics

What is Link Popularity, Page Reputation, and Page Importance?

One of the secrets to scoring at the top of the engines lies in understanding how to use link popularity, page reputation, and page importance (a.k.a., PageRank) to your advantage. And, it helps a great deal to have the right tools to measure these elelments so you can reverse-engineer the winning formulas of the pages you're competing. Doing so will give you the information you need to inject a calculated effort into your own ranking strategies.

Link Popularity

Link Popularity is a score based upon the number of incoming links pointed at a web page. In general, the more incoming links the better. There are exceptions to this generalization relating to the importance placed on link reputation and page importance in the final determination of the weight placed upon those incoming links.

Here are some generic (and free) online tools that can help you determine link popularity.

Page Reputation

Link Reputation is a score based upon what other pages' title and links are "saying" about your page. This is by far the most important factor of the three. And, since it is an off-page factor, search engines see it as the haredest element to artificially manipulate.

Fortunately there is a tool that helps us find, interpret, and influence these off-page factors and, when done correctly, gain a HUGE advantage over our competition. Click here for more information. This tool is a bit pricey, but it makes an almost impossible task easy! You can almost instantly analyze the incoming link structure of a competitor's site, determine their reputation, and then see what needs to be done to improve your own pages in order to beat the leading pages.

There are some online "free" tools that work tool. However, this tool does much better.

Page Importance

This factor is also referred to as PageRank due to the fact that Google produces a "rating" of pages by the same name. Google's PageRank rating has become the industry standard. Therefore, from here forth, we will refer to page importance simply as PageRank.

The tool you need is free. Go to http://toolbar.google.com and download the Google Toolbar. Once installed, this browser plug-in will produce a PageRank score for every page you visit.

The information above came from UnFair Advantage Book on Winning the Search Engines Wars – Version 93. They revise this resource every month, the most recent update being June 1st, 2004. We have found this resource to be invaluable. It is just part of what you get by subscribing to Search Engine News. If you want your site to perform well in search engines, you need this resource. Click here!

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