Top linked sites – What webmasters are linking to

We scan hundreds of thousands of sites daily here at Sucuri and while analyzing some of the data we got interested on what sites are getting the “link love” more often.

By link love, I mean what “do follow” links most webmasters have in their sites? After extracting the data from the last 500k scans we did, those were the top:

1. 6.9% – www.facebook.com
2. 6.4% – twitter.com
3. 2.8% – wordpress.org
4. 2.6% – youtube.com
5. 1.9% – feeds.feedburner.com
6. 1.2% – www.linkedin.com
7. 1.2% – www.google.com
8. 1.1% – validator.w3.org
9. 1.1% – wwww.adobe.com
10. 0.9% – www.addthis.com

So it means that 6.9% of the sites had a link to facebook, 6.4% to twitter, etc. I was actually surprised to see validator.w3.org ranked so well. We would be in a much better place if even 1% of the sites validated properly.

It also shows the force of WordPress, with almost 3% of the sites linking there (and probably using WordPress).

Those were the top 30:

1. www.facebook.com.
2. twitter.com.
3. wordpress.org.
4. www.youtube.com.
5. feeds.feedburner.com.
6. www.linkedin.com.
7. www.google.com.
8. validator.w3.org.
9. www.adobe.com.
10. www.addthis.com.
11. www.flickr.com.
12. www.myspace.com.
13. feedburner.google.com.
14. www.blogger.com.
15. www.macromedia.com.
16. statcounter.com.
17. www.amazon.com.
18. www.addtoany.com.
19. www.wordpress.org.
20. creativecommons.org.
21. bit.ly.
22. en.wikipedia.org.
23. facebook.com.
24. www.statcounter.com.
25. www.liveinternet.ru.
26. www.histats.com.
27. feeds2.feedburner.com.
28. www.apple.com
29. www.gnu.org
30. www.stumbleupon.com

It is also interesting that people are linking to shorten URLS (bit.ly) so often too. What do you think? What sites do you have linked in your own sites?