link popularity = A measure of the quantity and quality of sites that link to your site. therefore link popularity is totally dependent on no.of backlinks
It is also worth to note that one link from PR 8 page is weighs more than eight PR 1 page (in fact, it weighs much much more).
Link popularity means the no. of websites linking to your website but rememer that search engines while giving rankings give more importance to quality links than the quantity one. As an example if you get only 1 link from Yahoo it will be equal to 100 other links. Akash Kumar
Well to add to that, it is also important to get revelant site backlinks, i.e.backlinks for sites which have the same subject as your site
Ya related websites are of use if your website is related to web hosting industry and you exchange links with a widgets websites then it will not any difference to your rankings. Akash Kumar
Ya feel free to ask any question here. If you require more help then feel free to post it in this forum. Akash Kumar
If related links are so important, then what good are directories? The inner pages are normally low PR, and the sites aren't so much content as a bunch of links - what weighting do the big search engines give to that?