Search engines give sites with good inbound and outbound links a higher ranking. The logic goes that if you provide outbound links to other material you are providing a valuable service: and, if other sites link to you then you must have content of value.
The best way to discover how people are finding your web site is to analyze your site's activity logs. If you are unable to analyze these logs, you 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. 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.
You can use link:‘site URL’ feature of many search engines to list all the pages that link to your site, and that too in order of Page Rank. For Google, North Light and AltaVista, use link:xxyyzz.com to find the listing of pages that link to your web site www.xxyyzz.com For Alltheweb use link.all instead of link and for Inktomi use ‘linkdomain’ instead of ‘link’ in the above example. The results would be a list of all pages (if indexed by the search engine) that link to your target site, listed in the order of popularity.
If you need to find the link to specific pages instead of to an entire site, then the above link: feature will not work. Use the Advanced search features offered by HotBot and MSN Search, enter the full URL of the target page including http:// and use the option “links to URL” or similar.
Some sites offer to run comparison of the links to a chosen site vis-?-vis three other chosen sites. http://linkpop.marketleap.com and http://www.linkpopularitycheck.com are two such sites where you could submit your target URL and three other URLs that you wish to have a comparison done. www.linkpopularity.com is a site that will analyze the link popularity of a chosen URL in three prominent search engines.
Link analysis is somewhat different than measuring link popularity. While link popularity is generally used to measure the number of pages that link to a particular site, link analysis will go beyond this and analyze the popularity of the pages that link to your pages.
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