SEO Tools - Link Popularity

What is link Popularity? Link popularity is a general representation of the total number of web pages which link to a website (or individual web page). Most of the major search engines support the "link:" operator. Type in “link:” (without the quotation marks) in front of the URL about which you want to learn.

What does this tool do? This tool will query all the major search engines (Google, Yahoo, MSN, and Ask) when you enter the “link:” operator with your chosen URL. It will return the total link count for each URL.

You will notice that the totals vary greatly from search engine to search engine; this is because the figures shown represent the number of inbound links that are known to that search engine (which will vary based on the size of their database). Most of the search engines (Google especially) also apply various filters against the inbound links; therefore, some inbound-links may not be counted toward the total.

Why is link popularity important?. Link popularity is important because it is a major factor used by search engines in determining a site's position in search results. Generally, a site with more inbound links will be positioned higher than a similar site with fewer links. Other factors that are considered include anchor text.

Search Engine News - Google Launches Project Hosting

It’s common knowledge that Google likes open source software. With the search engine’s latest move to create an open source repository, it’s getting behind the open source community in a big way. For various reasons, however, it’s getting mixed reviews.

The company unveiled the new service at the O'Reilly Open Source Developers Conference. It's called Project Hosting, and like all Google betas, it's free to use, though you do need to have a Google account. The service is supposed to give open source software developers a web-based ability to track bugs and other issues with their software, collaborate, and otherwise handle the many details involved in working on and coordinating an open source project. You can see that the company is trying to keep the same clean interface for which it is famous (as you'll see in another screen shot in the next section). It has adopted the "release early, release often" motto popular within the open source community. Judging from some of the comments this particular service has received, however, it's one beta that may have been released just a little too early.

Google seems to be willing to accept the flak as the price it pays to make this work. Project Hosting was created by a regular, small team of Google developers; one wonders if this is one of the benefits of the "20% time" that Google gives its engineers. The goal of the service, according to Google Engineering Manager Greg Stein, is to make issue and bug tracking simpler. "We wanted to get it in peoples' hands and get our feedback so we can shape it as we get informed," Stein explained. "We're launching it very early because we want some feedback."