Measuring link popularity is important to know before attempting to submit to search engines. Track down your referral links from by using search engines. This method will give you an idea of how “popular” a search engine believes your web site is to them. That’s important for those search engines that rank sites in part by the site’s link popularity. Some sites are Google, AOL Search, HotBot, IWon, MSN Search, LookSmart, Inktomi, Alta Vista, and Northern Light.

However, there is no way you can exclude links from pages within the mysite.com domain from being counted.

Google considers www.my-busby-seo-test-blog.com to be different from my-busby-seo-test-blog.com. This means that typing in link: my-busby-seo-test-blog.com will not include the links to www.my-busby-seo-test-blog.com. If you want to find out the number of links to www.my-busby-seo-test-blog.com, you have to type in link: www.my-busby-seo-test-blog.com. And typing in link: www.my-busby-seo-test-blog.com will not include the links to my-busby-seo-test-blog.com either.

This is in contrast to AltaVista which includes links to the www.my-busby-seo-test-blog.com domain when you try to find the number of links to my-busby-seo-test-blog.com.