Link Popularity Importance to Good SEO Goals
Link popularity is an important factor in SEO optimization. The number and quality of inbound links is part of search engine algorithms that determine website ranking by evaluating the popularity and relevance of a site. A site with more inbound links will generally be ranked higher than one with fewer links. Knowing how many inbound links there are on the various search engines is a helpful metric.
Developer Shed Network’s Link Popularity Tool is available as a free download that you can embed in your website. By entering a URL, the tool will query Google, Yahoo and MSN and return the link count for the URL. The totals will vary between the search engines due to differences in database sizes and filtering possibilities that may prevent some inbound links from being counted.
When tested with several popular website URLs, this tool only returned results for Google, with no links appearing for Yahoo and MSN. It may be noted that when testing a variety of SEO tools offered from varying companies, Yahoo results often failed to show up. This likely indicates that the problem is Yahoo-based rather than tool-based.