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Measuring Link Popularity
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Measuring link popularity is important to know before attempting to submit to search engines. Track down your referral links from by using search engines. This method will give you an idea of how "popular" a search engine believes your web site is to them. That's important for those search engines that rank sites in part by the site's link popularity. Google, AOL Search, HotBot, iWon, MSN Search, Looksmart, Inktomi, Alta Vista, Northern Light.
Below we describe how to measure your link popularity at popular search engines.
"Understand that Link popularity is only one part of the Criteria search engines use to rank web pages. The other criteria is the quality of the selected link partners, is it linking from related sites. The other criteria are the context of the links is also taken into account, rather than just sheer numbers. Google uses a page rank formula to rate the quality of the links. Click here to see Google page rank formula as we see it.” "
Go to one of these search engines AltaVista, Google & Northern Light
To search for pages linking to your site, simply enter your domain this way:
link:yoursite.com
This will return all pages that have hyperlinks linking to your web site. This would include links such as your own pages that link back to a specific page:
http://yoursite.com
http://yoursite.com/products/
http://yoursite.com/products/toys.html
You can narrow the search to a particular URL by being more specific. Check to see what your popularity to each page is For example:
link:yoursite.com/ products/toys.html
Some pages from within your web site probably link to each other. To eliminate these showing up in the search, use the -url command such as:
link:yoursite.com -url:yoursite.com
This only works at AltaVista and Northern Light. There's no way to count links to a page and also simultaneously subtract links from within your own site to a page with Google.
Note that the URLs entered after link: don't include the www prefix. It's not necessary. The format shown will find links with or without the prefix. The http:// prefix is not necessary either with this command.
Fast AllTheWeb.com
To search for pages linking to your URLs, use the link.all: command, such as:
link.all:yoursite.com
Inktomi
Inktomi has a linkdomain: command that can be used to measure link popularity within its listings. However, because different Inktomi-partners may not implement this command correctly, you may find it doesn't always work in places where Inktomi results are used. How it works for major Inktomi partners is covered below.
To find all the pages linking to a particular domain, use linkdomain:, such as:
linkdomain:yoursite.com
To eliminate your own pages, use -domain such as:
linkdomain:yoursite.com -domain:yoursite.com
The command works above as shown for Inktomi results at Aol search, Hot Bot, iWon & MSN Search.
It does not work properly at LookSmart, because LookSmart will fail to show the entire count of links to a particular domain. Instead, it will max out at 1,000.
The linkdomain: command only works to measure the link popularity within an entire web site. In contrast, if you need to find just the links to a particular page, you'll need to use the advanced search pages offered by HotBot and MSN Search. Enter the full URL you wish to locate, including the http:// prefix. Then look for the "links to URL" or similar option. Conduct the search, and you'll be shown the links to that particular page.
Other Resources:
Link Popularity
http://www.linkpopularity.com/
Free and simple service that helps you generate link lists from three major search engines. Results can also be emailed each month.
Marketleap Visibility Index
http://linkpop.marketleap.com
Enter your URL, along with up to three comparison URLs, then see at a glance how you measure up in terms of sheer numbers of links to some major sites on the web. Free, easy to understand and use! You can then click on the report to see link count listings from the major search engines that are queried.
Link Popularity Check
http://www.linkpopularitycheck.com
Enter your URL, along with up to three comparison URLs, then see with bar charts how these particular sites compare to each other. You can also see the link count listings from the major search engines that are queried. Free, easy to use and you can have results emailed to you on a regular basis.
Compute Your Own Web Traffic Rank
http://www.useit.com/alertbox/relativeranking.html
This isn't really about measuring link popularity, but it is an interesting method of determining the overall popularity of your site. In short, Jakob Nielsen explains that dividing your site's page views by the page views of the web's most popular site tells you how popular your site is.
Counting Clicks and Looking at Links
The Search Engine Report, Aug. 4, 1998
Discusses how link popularity is used at some major search engines and some experimental ones.
