Link popularity is the total number of backlinks pointing to a website or page. It was one of the earliest off-page signals search engines used to gauge importance, built on a simple premise: pages that many others link to are probably worth surfacing. On its own, though, raw count tells only part of the story.
Early search engines could be gamed by sheer volume — thousands of low-value links could inflate a page's standing. That era ended with updates like Penguin, which devalued spammy link profiles and the link juice they claimed to pass. Consider two sites: one with 1,000 links from scraped directories and link farms, another with 40 links from respected industry publications. Today the second site almost always outranks the first. Link popularity still counts, but only when weighted by trust and relevance.
The two are easy to confuse. Link popularity counts every backlink, so ten links from the same domain count as ten. Domain popularity counts unique linking domains, so those same ten links count as one. Domain popularity is usually the more meaningful measure, because a hundred links from one site signal far less than a hundred links from a hundred different sites.
Growing a healthy, diverse link profile is the job of off-page SEO.
No. A handful of relevant, authoritative links typically outperforms a large pile of weak or irrelevant ones, and a toxic profile can actively hurt you.