Your ability to make that crucial first few links in a search engine is significantly impacted by the links that come into your site and Robin Good has a nice compact page on getting past the basics of "how many" to "what are they worth"? How To Measure The Link Popularity Of A Website

Link popularity is essentially based on the number of incoming links to a specific web site or web page; the more the number of incoming links, the higher the link popularity.

[...] Along with giving more importance to the number of links a web page has, search engines also pay close attention to link patterns. So it is not only the number of links pointing to your web page that determines your position inside the SERPs, but also the quality of those very links.

The quality of a link is determined by two factors:

a) authority of the web page linking to you and

b) the link anchor text.

[...] A qualified analysis should also factor in link context and link quality, which are critical elements of how search engines, such as Google, make use of links to determine who appears higher or lower inside search engine result pages.

Robin has gathered and reviewed a group of tools and web services that allow you to measure your web site link popularity using these criteria:

* Search engine references: Search engines utilized to count all incoming links.

* Comparative analysis: Comparative reporting against one or more sites.

* Email Reporting: Link popularity report sent to your inbox.

* Domain exclusion: Exclusion of incoming links from your own domain.

* PageRank Check: Google ranking check for your site.

Do you think about where your traffic comes from and who links to you, or does in not matter as long as someone is finding your material? Do you acticvely seek links, promote cross linking amonf related organisations or just hope for the best.

Or are you like some news organisations and jealous of your content to the point where you don't want other people to get some of the value you produce by quoting and linking to you? Tell us the tale in comments please.

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