The concept of Link popularity was first brought to the web by a new search engine called Google. A couple of Harvard students wanted to design a new way of searching and indexing websites. Prior to Google, search engines were very simple. A search engine spider or ‘bot’ only had a few things to follow; one being meta tags and the other was keyword density. These spiders were only interested in one thing, a websites ‘on page SEO’.  So for a company selling “web design” they would type in various key word scenarios related to web design and place them in their website’s meta tags and saturate their page content. At the time this seemed to work, but when the Google guys decided that they wanted to expand upon the current concept and created link popularity, those methods began to backfire. The new engine would be looking for more than just tags and keywords it would look for the relationship between websites through linking. This was simply one site using a hyper link linking to another. So that same web design company that was coming up in the other engines would be have to have some links to be a good result in google. This gave the consumer the ability to decide the results.  Example:  Lets say the web design company started getting links from their clients websites, the more sites the more links the more credibility in Google’s eyes. This created the new concept called Reciprocal Linking.