Domain Popularity
Domain popularity denotes the number of backlinks that direct from different domains to a website.
Domain popularity basics
Google checks the value and reputation of a website on the Internet based on the number of backlinks. Over time, it turned out that this statistic was only partially suitable. If a website is recommended by one person over and over again, in other words, hundreds or even thousands or backlinks are set from just one website, it is still in effect only a recommendation. Therefore, as part of domain popularity (short domain pop) an additional verification is done of how many sites the backlinks originate from.
Each domain from which one or more backlinks are received is rated with one point only. A website that provides 100 links to another, has the same value with respect to domain popularity as one with only one outgoing link. This is to find out how many different people consider a website useful and recommendable.
Measures to improve domain popularity
There are a variety of measures that can contribute to improving domain popularity. In particular, it involves link building options that result in topic-related high-quality backlinks from as many different websites as possible. Specifically, the following possible measures should be considered:
- Natural linking to high-quality content
- Links from communities and forums
- Backlinks from blogs (for example through guest articles, product exchange or product testing)
- Setup of satellite sites with different URLs
- Dissemination of articles on article directories and press releases
- Purchase or rental of links
Not every possible measure is welcome and tolerated by Google. For example, link buying should be avoided because once uncovered, it very often leads to penalties. Since domain popularity has gained increased importance in recent years, many of the once common link building methods are almost obsolete. For instance, footer links that multiply through the amount of sub-pages of a website have lost their power for link building.
How to determine domain popularity
To determine domain popularity, website operators must find out how many links direct from other domains to their website. There are a variety of free and paid backlink tools on the Internet for this purpose. Free tools provide you with a preliminary overview, but are not a good basis to form profound strategies, as they provide in part very unreliable data. A better basis for professionals would be validated data from the backlink tools of large SEO suites.
Importance for search engine optimization
Currently, domain popularity is one of the main criteria for the importance of a website in the eyes of search engines. Excellent domain popularity may thus be an important success factor for good positioning in the SERPs. The former ranking factor of “link popularity” has been largely supplanted and replaced by domain popularity. Link popularity could be manipulated too easily, which is not the case for domain popularity.
It is questionable whether domain popularity will remain the benchmark in the long term, or be replaced with IP-popularity. Backlinks coming from domains with the same IP address would have decreased value since they are managed by the same host. This could, however, affect innocent website operators since large service providers have a great number of customers. Therefore, IT-popularity as a criterion is still somewhat controversial.