How Popular is your website?
One of the best ways to measure a websites popularity is to know how many other sites link to it. The thinking goes that if your site is good, others will link to it. Search engines such as google use this extensively to determine how well your site ranks.
In the past a web page's ranking was determined by primative 'on-page' elements such as the page text, META tags, title tag and the key word tag. When web developers learned that they could trick a search engine to return their web pages by cramming keywords into their pages the search engines had to get a bit smarter - this is where link popularity comes into play.
However the pure number of links from other sites that link to your site is not only important, what's also important is the quality of those sites. This is because web site owners figured out many ways to get links pointing to their web sites.... for example "link farm" sites were created which only contained nothing more than a collection of links.
With this is mind, above is a free and easy-to-use tool that allows you to check up to 4 sites at once. All you do is enter into the URL and it will return to you with the number of other sites on the internet that contain a link to your web site. These work by interrogating search engines to obtain the number of pages in their indexes which link to your site. The tool check's Live Search, Google, Yahoo!, Ask.com, Altavista and AllTheWeb.