Today I read a great post titled, “101 Ways to Build Link Popularity” by Aaron Wall. So I started to ponder where link popularity as a factor for search engine rankings will be headed.

Today, you can buy links from basically any site imaginable using a company like TextLinkAds. You can gain text links from directory services such as DMOZ. And you can gain links from within content articles. The bottom line is getting links is easy, getting the best quality links is not as easy.

Google has already started to change its value for text links and I see this becoming even more of a priority factor. So I believe that text links will continue to play a major role in determining the rank of a page/site within the search engines. But each link will now begin to carry an associated value with it. Some of the value determining factors include source of link, age of linking site, placement of link.

A very basic weighting model might look something like (10 being highest):

• Weight 10 - Link within an article from a reputable/trusted source
• Weight 9 - Main page link from a reputable/trusted source
• Weight 8 - Link within an article from a non-trusted source
• Weight 7-5 - ….
• Weight 4 - Above the fold link on trusted site
• Weight 3 - Above the fold link on non-trusted site
• Weight 2 - Footer link on trusted site
• Weight 1 - Footer link on non-trusted site

In my example above, interior article links are worth the most, while cheap footer links are worth the least. It will be interesting to watch how link popularity moves within the ranks of the search engines over the next year. When I attended the Search Engine Strategies conference in February, there were many companies built on the sole premise of selling text links. It certainly is a lucrative market and I am not sure the search engines will be so quick to destroy it.

Lastly to quote a famous phrase, “It’s all about location, location, location”.

– Allen, Director, OrganicStats

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