What is Global Link Popularity and how important is it?

• I know that link popularity is important, but I'm confused about what is meant by the 'Global Link Popularity' of a site. Can you please explain what is being referenced by this term?

Answer: Global Link Popularity (GLP; also referred to as Link Authority) is the total link authority of a site based on all links pointing to the site from anywhere on the web and encompassing both link quality and link quantity.

GLP is an extremely important ranking factor. Picture a major city with supporting infrastructure. You'll find highways, airports, train and bus stations, and perhaps even a shipping port. It's easy to see that such a city would have an authoritative influence over the surrounding small towns and outlying areas.

Additionally, when these authoritative websites have other authoritative websites linking to them, then the engines assign them even more authority.

In fact and in practice, links matter greatly! ...but even so, the quality of the incoming links matters even more. It's better to have a few links coming from a couple of important, i.e. authoritative sites than a hundred links coming from small, obscure, or topically unrelated sites. In fact, any GLP that includes links from highly authoritative sites will usually rank much better than a competing site which lacks such authoritative links—even when the competing site has more links, all else being equal.

So, the bottom line is that while GLP (the total number of incoming links) is important, it's far more important to ensure that your site has links coming from sites that are recognized as authority sites. Combine this with a linking strategy that focuses on topically related incoming links and non-reciprocal (i.e., one way) incoming links and you'll likely find that your pages will rank higher than competitor pages that are heavy only in GLP, but less focused on the actual quality of their incoming links.

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