Measuring Link Popularity

The best way to discover how people are finding your web site is to analyze your site's activity logs, a topic which is covered in depth on the Keywords Used To Find Your Web Site page available to site subscribers.

Those unable to analyze their logs can instead use search engines to track down referral links. In particular, this method gives you an idea of how "popular" a search engine believes your site to be. That's important for those search engines that rank sites in part by the site's link popularity.

You can use the same commands at either AltaVista or Infoseek to search for pages linking to your site. Simply enter your domain this way:

link:searchenginewatch.com

This will return all pages that have hyperlinks containing the text searchenginewatch.com. That would include links such as:

http://searchenginewatch.com/facts/
http://searchenginewatch.com/facts/majors.html
http://searchenginewatch.com/webmasters/
http://searchenginewatch.com/webmasters/popularity.html

You can narrow the search to a particular URL by being more specific. For example:

link:searchenginewatch.com/webmasters/popularity.html
link:geocities.com/WallStreet/Floor/12345/
link:members.aol.com/mysite/

Some pages from within your site probably link to each other. To eliminate these, use the -url command, such as:

link:searchenginewatch.com/ -url:searchenginewatch.com
link:geocities.com/WallStreet/Floor/12345/ -url:geocities.com/WallStreet/Floor/12345/
link:members.aol.com/mysite/ -url:members.aol.com/mysite/

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.

Searching at the Inktomi-powered HotBot and MSN Search services works similarly to AltaVista and Infoseek, but the commands are slightly different. Instead of link, use linkdomain, such as:

linkdomain:searchenginewatch.com

To eliminate your own pages, use -domain, such as:

linkdomain:searchenginewatch.com -domain:searchenginewatch.com

This method only works for root URLs. If you need to find a link to a particular page, you'll need to use the menu commands at HotBot, or the advanced search option at MSN Search.

At HotBot, enter your URL into the search box, then choose the "links to this URL" option. This will display pages linking to the exact URL. Keep in mind that if you enter a root URL, such as:

http://owmg.org

You'll only be shown only pages that link to that exact URL, rather than the entire site within the domain. Thus, the link count will be lower than if you use the linkdomain option. Also, the menu option will not eliminate links from within your own site.

To do the same thing at MSN Search, go to the Advanced Search page, enter your URL and set the "find" option to "links to URL."

You can only get a general estimate of link popularity using Excite. Enter your URL into the search box without the http:// prefix. The page count will give you a rough idea of how many pages may be linking to you. Unfortunately, there is no way to eliminate your own pages.

Link Popularity
http://www.linkpopularity.com/
This free service aims to make calculating your link popularity easy. Simply enter your domain, and the service reports your link count from AltaVista, Infoseek and HotBot. You can then click on links to display the actual results from those services. You can also sign up to have reports e-mailed each month.

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.