The term used to describe the number of hypertext links coming into a website from other websites. This factor is being used by many top search engines to improve a website's ranking and is therefore an important consideration for any website, but especially for new ones who need to build up such links as quickly as possible. Google, for instance, points to link popularity as the "democratic" value of the internet. While they never make it perfectly clear how much each factor is weighted in their ranking algorithms the fact that they always mention it first and foremost suggests that a site's popularity, best reflected in its PageRank, is one of the major factors in the way Google evaluates web sites.