Measuring Link Popularity:

How do search engines define link popularity?
• The number of active links on your website.
• The quality and reputation of the linking parties.
• The number of times visitors click on the link to your website.
• The duration of time spent on your website, by visitors.
• The return rate of victors to your website.

The best way to discover how people are finding your web site is to analyze your site's activity logs. 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 are detailed descriptions on how to measure the link popularity, of your website, at the more 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.

AltaVista, Google & Northern Light:
To search for pages linking to your site, simply enter your domain this way:

link:google.com

This will return all pages that have hyperlinks linking to the google.com web site. 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.

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:amazon.com

To eliminate your own pages, use -domain
linkdomain:amazin.com -domain:yoursite.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.