5 Types of Popularity for Ranking

• Link popularity: simply links coming into any website from any and all sources. This is a broad term as other popularity types will fall under the effect of Link Popularity because the link is the method.

• Industry Popularity: the relationship of a site in its known industry to the industry. Are the big industry sites pointing to the site? There are always a few blogs in every industry that stand out, and become celebrity blogs. Matt Cutts, Graywolf, Shoemoney, these are celebrity blogs they gain high industry traffic and link out to their industry. The “BlogRoll” becomes the popularity factor and passes far more power than any directory. Industry popularity focuses on a sites’ prominence in the industry, it can be effective, but it tends to make a group popular and misses the larger core of the industry, so this popularity needs to be factored appropriately. Problems with Industry popularity include blogroll spam, now very common and a potential cause for future devaluation of blogrolls.

• Social Popularity: very similar to Industry popularity, except here it is values passed from social sites like digg and del.icio.us. Multiple instances of a site on a social site are factored in the algorithms.

• Click Popularity: used lightly and in conjunction with analytics data to determine bounce rates. Since this is the least accurate measurement, it is believed to be used lightly in its importance for ranking. Click popularity is pulled mainly from the main search index and clicks are counted. Click popularity tends to me more of a theory and is definitely used in PPC campaigns to track and determine traffic patterns on sites.
• Blog Popularity: this one is a “throw in” and is related to Google more than other engines, Google places more emphasis and trust in blogs, mainly because they have almost grown up on them and because they feel the human element is there. You can negotiate this till the cows come home, but there is more than enough evidence to say that Google favors blogs and blog links over the more traditional website. So, in summary, Blog Popularity is the ratio of incoming links solely from blogs – in theory.