Simply put --- link popularity is a measure of the quantity and quality of other sites that link to your site.

Among many other factors, most of the major search engines now factor Link Popularity into their relevancy algorithms. As a result, increasing the number of quality, relevant sites which link to your site can actually improve your search engine rankings. There is still no one "secret trick" to getting good rankings, but boosting your site's popularity may give it the edge it needs.

For example, Google looks at link popularity as one of many factors, in determining a Web pages Page Rank. The higher the Page Rank, the higher the page position in search results. Google considers far more than the number of sites that link to your site. It also examines all aspects of the page content as well as the content of pages linking to that page when determining Page Rank.

Good link popularity can dramatically increase traffic to your web site. Well placed links are an excellent source of consistent and targeted traffic. Knowing who links to your site and increasing the number of quality links is an important part of any web site promotion effort

To search for pages linking to a specific page on your site, enter the following url on Google or Yahoo.

link:http://yourdomainname/pagename.html