Search Engine Saturation Frequently Asked Questions

Q. What is the difference between Search Saturation and Link Popularity? The numbers look very different.

A. Search Engine Saturation represents the number of pages from a domain name indexed by the search engines. Analyzing the report you build using Marketleap's tools will show how many of your pages are currently available to be searched in 5 of the leading search engines (Fast, AltaVista, Google, Hotbot, Northern Light). As an example, www.marketleap.com has about 455 pages indexed between the 5 engines while www.coke.com has about 36 pages indexed.

The results of the SE Index do not reflect ranking, but rather the number of available pages from a domain that can potentially be part of the results of a related search.

Link popularity refers to the number of pages that contain a link to your domain. So using our example, Marketleap.com would have about 3,704 web pages that contain a link to www.marketleap.com and www.coke.com would have about 29,219 pages with a link pointing to that domain. This does not reflect ranking.

Having a high link popularity number (assuming those pages linking to you are quality sites) will help your ranking with search engines like Google. A high index count means that you have more pages available for the engines to consider when building its search results. The two numbers are not tied together. They are both unique ways to understand your availability and popularity online.