Neo•Paradigms
Link popularity is one of the main ingredients of success for achieving Higher Search Rankings . The reason for this is that many Search Engines now factor link popularity into their page ranking equations.
As a result, increasing the number of relevant links to your site will actually improve your page rankings and ultimately your link popularity.
Reciprocal Links are considered the most effective way to increase traffic to your site.
If you are a webmaster with a site created for web developers, and would like to share a reciprocal link with us and increase your link popularity, please let us know and we will review your site for link relevancy. If your site matches our strict criteria we will be more than happy to exchange links with you.
Below is described how to measure link popularity at popular crawler-based search engines.
Be aware that "link 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:yourdomain.com
This will return all pages that have hyperlinks linking to the yourdomain.com web site. This would include links such as:
http://yourdomain.com
http://yourdomain.com/webmasters/
http://yourdomain.com/webmasters/popularity.html
You can narrow the search to a particular URL by being more specific. For example:
link:yourdomain.com/webmasters/popularity.html
Some pages from within your site probably link to each other. To eliminate these, use the -url command*:
link:yourdomain.com -url:yourdomain.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:yourdomain.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:yourdomain.com
To eliminate your own pages, use -domain:
linkdomain:yourdomain.com -domain:yourdomain.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.
