Measuring Link Popularity

he 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 page available to

Those unable to analyze their logs can 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 because all major search engines consider a site's link popularity in their ranking algorithm.

The information below describes how link popularity is measured 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.