've found myself involved in a lot of discussions about
dropping importance of link popularity lately. Numerous people have said to me that they think incoming links no longer hold as much weight as they once did, and that only links worth obtaining are relevant links. I have to vehemently disagree.First of all, before Sergey Brin or Larry Page even learned word 'algorithm', there were web sites that practiced fine art of reciprocal linking. Pre-Google link exchanges served only one purpose and that was to develop direct traffic from those links. This still works! Somewhere in our PR worries and link popularity ambitions, we forgot one important fact : you never know when next link you obtain for your site will be a direct traffic producer. For example moving.ca, provides daily traffic to www.abalone.ca through a small, text link on their links page. This does not come up on Google as an incoming link to Abalone Designs, but it is one our most valuable incoming links, nonetheless.
Now, as far as your ranking is concerned on Google, links still hold weight. Search for just about any term or phrase and check #1 ranked site's incoming links versus others. 9 times out of 10, The first ranked site will have a few more links than others. The times when I see lower ranked sites having more incoming links than #1 site, generally speaking, #1 site has better content, and more of it or this site's incoming links have anchor text that contain exact search term or phrase you searched for and others don't. It's still same old formula. Offer a content-rich, user-friendly site with incoming links that have relevant anchor text and your site'll do alright.
Relevant anchor text is important, but what about having your link on relevant sites? Links on relevant sites or pages have one tremendous bonus and that is targeted traffic. This is providing, of course, link produces direct traffic. Other than that, I say links on relevant pages aren't that much more important than other links. Take, for example, incoming links to seoinc.com - very first page that shows up on Google when you search for seoinc.com's incoming links, is csmonitor.com. A Christian Science magazine! If I'm missing some link between religion and SEO, please inform me, but otherwise, these two sites couldn't be more different. Google has deemed this an important incoming link for seoinc.com, regardless. You think you know algorithm, but you don't. You never know when links will count.
