hey Wild,
When determing link popularity everyone has their own prefered way of checking traffic.
As Linda noted Alexa isn't a guranteed source because its information is gathered ONLY from people who have installed the Alexa toolbar.
When I check for popularity I usually do 3 things.
1). Check Alexa
2). do a search in google for "domain.com", to see how many websites either mention domain.com or have a link pointing to it.
** note in the above example keep the quotes. I do not trust the results presented by link:domain.com so I don't use it.
3). I check to see if the domain name has a PAID listing in the yahoo directory. (
http://dir.yahoo.com).
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Catalyst:
If I can find the article, I found an article by a large statistical firm, which actually lists the search engines that get the most users and which ones generate the most sales. (I will hold you in anticipication since according to this study google doesn't generate the most SALES!)