Measuring Link Popularity
"Which search engines use link popularity as a factor in ranking
pages?" Well, that question has become pretty moot these days.
Just about every search engine uses link popularity as a factor.
So, how do you find out how much link popularity your site has?
And how do you know which sites are actually linking to you? In
this article, I'll tell you how you can find out the link popularity of
your site in the 11 major search engines.
- AltaVista
In order to find out the number of sites linking to the domain
mysite.com in AltaVista, you would type in link:mysite.com in
AltaVista's search box. If you wish to exclude links from pages
within the mysite.com domain, you would type in link:mysite.com
-url:mysite.com.
If you want to find out how many sites are linking to a particular
page (say mypage.html) in the mysite.com domain, you would
type in link:mysite.com/mypage.html. Again, in order to exclude
links from pages within the mysite.com domain, you would type
in link:mysite.com/mypage.html -url:mysite.com.
Note that you should not type in the "www" or the "http://"
prefixes.
- AOL
There is no special command to measure link popularity in AOL.
You can consider typing in mysite.com to measure the links to
mysite.com, but you will get highly inaccurate results.
- Excite
There is no way you can find out the link popularity of your site in
Excite. This is because Excite does not return the number of
sites which match the search criterion. Furthermore, like AOL,
there is no special command for measuring link popularity.
- 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.
You should not type in the "www" prefix in Google. However,
including the "http://" prefix is permissible - it will not change the
results.
- HotBot
There are two methods of measuring link popularity in Hotbot.
In the first case, in order to find out the number of sites linking to
mysite.com, you can type in linkdomain:mysite.com. In order to
exclude links from pages within the mysite.com domain, you can
use linkdomain:mysite.com -domain:mysite.com.
Make sure that you do not use the "www" or "http://" prefixes
when you use this method.
However, this method cannot be used to find out the number of
links to specific pages in your site, i.e. you cannot use this
method to find out the links to the page mypage.html in the
domain mysite.com.
In order to find out the number of links to specific pages, choose
"links to this URL" from the "Look for:" drop-down combo box and
then type in the complete URL (i.e.
http://www.mysite.com/mypage.html) in the search box. In order
to exclude links from within the mysite.com domain, type
http://www.mysite.com/mypage.html -domain:mysite.com in the
search box after choosing "links to this URL" from the combo
box. Note that for the second method, you need to use the
"http://" prefix.
Lastly, you should note that in the second method, typing
http://www.mysite.com will only find links to the home page of the
www.mysite.com domain, and not any of the other pages.
- Infoseek
The method of measuring link popularity in Infoseek is exactly the same as in AltaVista.
- Lycos
In order to measure link popularity in Lycos, first click on the
Advanced Search link below the search box. To find out the
number of sites linking to mysite.com in Lycos, you would type in
ml:mysite.com in the search box. If you wish to exclude links
from pages within the mysite.com domain, you would type in
ml:mysite.com -h:mysite.com.
If you want to find out how many sites are linking to a particular
page (say mypage.html) in the mysite.com domain, you would
type in ml:mysite.com/mypage.html. Again, in order to exclude
links from pages within the mysite.com domain, you would type
in ml:mysite.com/mypage.html -h:mysite.com.
Note that you should not type in the "www" or the "http://"
prefixes.
- 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. It is not displayed in MSN's home page.
- Netscape
Netscape is a directory based engine. It takes its results from the
Open Directory. If no results are found in the Open Directory, it
takes its results from Google. Since it is a directory based
engine, the concept of measuring link popularity is not all that
meaningful. You can type in link:mysite.com to measure the
number of links to the domain mysite.com. In this case,
Netscape will simply take its results from Google.
- Northern Light
There is no special command for measuring link popularity in
Northern Light. To get a very approximate idea of the number of
sites linking to the domain mysite.com, you can type in
mysite.com. In order to eliminate the references to the
mysite.com domain from within the domain, you can type in
mysite.com -url:mysite.com.
To get an approximate measure of the number of links to the page
mypage.html in the domain mysite.com, you can type in
mysite.com/mypage.html in the search box. Again, to eliminate
the references to the page from within the mysite.com domain,
you would type mysite.com/mypage.html -url:mysite.com
Don't type in the "http://" or "www" prefixes.
- Webcrawler
There is no way you can find out the link popularity of your site in
Webcrawler. This is because, like Excite, Webcrawler does not
return the number of sites which match the search criterion. Also,
there is no special command for measuring link popularity.
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