Link Popularity - How Important Is This?

Link popularity is one of the most important ways to increase your website's ranking with search engines. This is very important for your website because you're more likely to appear on the front page of the search results if your website has strong link presence.
Why is link popularity so important?
Most webmasters and SEO professionals will tell you that the more popular the site your website is linked to, the more important search engines will think your website information is. This is a particular assumption because websites with high page ranking are already important because they display important information in its pages. So, if one of those high page ranking sites displays a link going to your website, search engines will believe that your site is also displaying important information.
Does link popularity affect your website's traffic?
It helps your website to receive more traffic, sometimes gradually and sometimes really fast. If your website is linked to several high page ranking websites, you're probably going to receive a lot of traffic. However, if you are linked to websites with low page ranking, your links to high page ranking sites are going to quickly lose their importance leaving your website in a poor condition when it comes to page rank.
How is link popularity measured by search engines?
This is a very complex process. Search engine weight the importance of incoming links, but they're often checking that webmasters are not trying to link their sites to important sites only. They constantly check for the relevance of the link. Let's say that you have a link on YouTube, and this link sends traffic to your website, but your link was built on a prank video, and your site is about furniture sale. Search engines will understand that you have a link on an important site, but they will also know the link to your furniture website has nothing in common with the video of a prank; then, your link will be useless, and will add no rank to your site.