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 Search Engine Watch members.

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.

Below is described how to measure link popularity at popular crawler-based search engines.

Be aware that "popularity" is only one part of the link analysis systems that search engines such as Google use to rank web pages. The quality and context of links is also taken into account, rather than sheer numbers.

The More About Link Analysis article available to
Search Engine Watch members provides additional
information about how link analysis works and ways to
find the "important" links that can benefit your web site.
Click here to learn more about becoming a member

AltaVista, Google & Northern Light

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 linking to the searchenginewatch.com web site. This would include links such as:

http://searchenginewatch.com
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

Some pages from within your site probably link to each other. To eliminate these, use the -url command (see the Checking Your Listings page for more about this command), such as:

link:searchenginewatch.com -url:searchenginewatch.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.

AllTheWeb.com

To search for pages linking to your URLs, use the link.all: command, such as:

link.all:searchenginewatch.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 use linkdomain:, such as:

linkdomain:searchenginewatch.com

To eliminate your own pages, use -domain (see the Checking Your Listings page for more about this command), such as:

linkdomain:searchenginewatch.com -domain:searchenginewatch.com

The command works above as shown for Inktomi results at:

AOL Search
HotBot
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

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.

LinkPopularity
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.

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.