The search engines also examine the relevance of the links to the subject matter of your site.
For example, if a website that sells vitamins has 4,000 inbound links, but the source of most of the links are websites that have nothing to do with vitamins, then the algorithm that search engines use to determine link popularity will take that into account, and the link popularity score will not be very good.
It is possible for a website with a relatively small number of quality inbound links to be ranked higher than a site with a bunch of irrelevant or insignificant links.
If I have a website that offers quotes for auto insurance, and I have 800 quality inbound links, then I might receive a much higher search engine ranking than another mortgage site that has 3,000 links that stem from link farms or Free For All (FFA) pages.
If you try to acquire inbound by using link farms or FFA pages, not only will it hurt your search engine ranking, but you might get permanently removed from the search engine listings.
Links farms are sites where you can instantly exchange links with all the sites listed in that directory.
FFA pages are pointless link directories.
The search engines usually discount any links that come from either of these sources.
Now that we understand what link popularity is and how it works, we need to look specifically at how Google measures it.
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