Link Popularity
As explained in the Google Pagerank page, some of the weight that determines where Google will rank a web site in the results comes from offsite factors or in other words inbound links. These are links to your website preferably in appropriate hypertext as explained in the "website internal hyperlinking" page.
I have seen web pages and websites gaining top ranking on Google for a keyword or phrase when that word or phrase does not appear anywhere on the page that ranks. One example of this was a search for the word computers, which used to (not now) place Dell and IBM right at the top of the rankings even though the word "computers" did not appear anywhere on their homepages.
Actually this is still true of the Dell website to some extent. At the time of writing it appears in position six in the rankings and the word computers still does not appear on its homepage. The link above is to the cache of the Dell website result. Click it and have a look at the text in the gray box at the top of the screen.
At the top of the linked page you will actually see the words, "These terms only appear in links pointing to this page: computers". It's high ranking for what is an extremely important and valuable keyword is entirely down to the fact that so many other websites link to it using hypertext that includes the word computers, e.g. Dell Computers. This proves conclusively that external links to a website are much more important than on page content.
Checking Link Popularity
Links to your own website can be checked using Google’s "link:" operator. To use it you enter link:www.yourwebsitename.com into the Google search box. This will then list some of the pages that link to your website. We have to point out that Google does not list all the links to websites.You may get more accurate results by using the same search in Yahoo! or Bing. (We cover the link operator in more detail on the link building page.)
Further analysis like this is possible using the other Google advanced operators. You can get more information on these on this website, http://www.googleguide.com/advanced_operators.html
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