Measuring link popularity

There are multiple link popularity tools to help website owners find out who is linking to their site, but also to give a useful benchmarking report to quickly show where you stand in comparison to competitors and other major online players.

Here are some ideas for useful data you can gather using the Link Popularity tool:

Google : In order to find out the number of sites linking to mysite.com in Google you would type in link:mysite.com. If you want to find out how many sites are linking to the page mypage.html in the mysite.com domain, you would type in link: mysite.com /mypage.html. However, there is no way you can exclude links from pages within the www.mysite.com domain from being counted.

AltaVista : n order to find out the number of sites linking to the domain abcsite.com in AltaVista you would type in link:mypage.html in AltaVista

AOL : is a directory based engine - it takes its results from the Open Directory. Hence, the concept of measuring link popularity is not very meaningful.

MSN: The method of measuring link popularity in MSN is almost the same as that in HotBot The first method is exactly the same. For the second method, click on the More Options tab, type in the complete URL in the "Search the web for:" text box and choose "links to URL" from the "Find:" drop-down combo box. However, unlike HotBot you cannot eliminate links from pages within the same domain using the second method.

Note that the More Options tab is displayed only after you search for something in MSN t is not displayed in MSN's home page.