HotBot , AltaVista , MSN , Lycos , Northern Light , Inktomi , Excite and others also use link popularity in their formulas. Eventually every major engine will use link popularity, so developing and maintaining it are essential to your search engine placement. Link popularity can do a lot for your site. Not only will many search engines rank you higher, but links from other sites will also drive more traffic to you. Not just numbers Link popularity is much more than a measure of how many links point to a site.
Search engines use far more sophisticated formulas to gauge how popular sites are.
Although lots of irrelevant links are less effective than a few relevant ones, they're better than nothing. Inktomi , a company that provides search results to engines like HotBot , still values the number of links more than anything else. Relevance - Search engines prioritize incoming links from pages that are relevant to the page in question. For example, if you sell puppy food, a link from a dog food supplier can boost your rankings more than one from, say, your sister's gardening site. Link text - The text used to describe a link can also affect your rankings.