I've talked in the past about how much value we've found from studying the most linked-to content on the web, and tonight, we've updated that list again, showing relative rises and falls in link popularity across the web's most popular sites & pages.

If you haven't yet had a chance to browse the Top Domains and Top Pages list, make sure you spend a few minutes glancing through it. There are some remarkably interesting trends illustrated - some surprising and many that are intuitive. The sorting is done in order, not of raw link counts, but of linking root domains - a metric that we've found incredibly valuable both for identifying broad popularity (vs. sites that simply earn lots of links from a few sites with many pages) as well as filtering spam (it's easy to get lots of pages linking to you, and even easy to get lots of subdomains linking to you, but getting a diverse set of root domains is considerably harder).

A few that interested me most:

• There was absolutely no change - 0 up or down - in the top most linked-to domains
• Twitter gained another 11 positions, to rank ahead of domains LiveJournal.com and WashingtonPost.com
• Vimeo is having a lot of success on the video platform front - they're up 28 positions to #175
• A few of the web's most popular blogs rose considerably - Huffingtonpost.com (+10) andTechCrunch.com (+13)
• Some social media darlings are also experiencing big growth - Ning.com (+16), Yelp.com (+22), Etsy.com (+26) 
• Whitehouse.gov was a big winner again, with another 10 position jump (the new web strategy must be earning attention)
• A lot of .edu sites are falling - Ucla.edu (-22), Yale.edu (-27), Nyu.edu (-21), and many others
• Dmoz.org continued to fall (another 10 positions this round), no surprise given its increasing lack of relevance
• Top new entrants on the list include Information.com (#222), Hotlog.ru (#225), Howstuffworks.com (#267) and Webmasterplan.com (#302)
• The sites with the most disparity between Google homepage PR and ranking position include UsaToday.com, Google.co.jp and phpbb.com (all of whom are suffering from TBPR penalties, though they probably haven't lost much else) 

The Biggest Gainers (Root Domains):

1. Icann.org (+71)
2. Co.cc (+29)
3. Vimeo.com (+28)
4. Etsy.com (+26)
5. Tumblr.com (+23)
6. Yelp.com (+22)
7. Uspto.gov (+22)
8. Histats.com (+21)
9. StarTribune.com (+17)
10. Ning.com (+16)

The Biggest Gainers (Pages):

1. http://vimeo.com/ (+149)
2. http://www.facebook.com/home.php (+141)
3. http://www.icann.org/udrp/udrp.htm (+103)
4. http://www.uspto.gov/main/trademarks.htm (+103)
5. http://joomla.org/ (+74)
6. http://www.statcounter.com/free_web_stats.html (+57)
7. http://china.alibaba.com/member/myalibaba.htm (+55)
8. http://page.china.alibaba.com/html/danai/channel_index.html (+55)
9. http://www.siteground.com/ (+52)
10. http://www.parallels.com/ (+52)

The Biggest Losers (Root Domains):

1. Cancer.org (-96)
2. Utah.edu (-84)
3. Uci.edu (-67)
4. Wustl.edu (-63)
5. Usc.edu (-44)
6. Ucsd.edu (-44)
7. Freehostia.com (-36)
8. Duke.edu (-29)
9. Bebo.com (-28)
10. Yale.edu (-27)

The Biggest Losers (Pages):

1. http://www.webnews.de/ (-263)
2. http://www.blinklist.com/ (-241)
3. http://www.furl.net/ (-182)
4. http://www.mister-wong.de/ (-162)
5. http://www.cancer.org/ (-62)
6. http://www.stumbleupon.com/ (-59)
7. http://slashdot.org/ (-34)
8. http://digg.com/ (-31)
9. http://www.swsoft.com/plesk/ (-30)
10. http://www.technorati.com/ (-28)

Finally, I wanted to explore some of the distribution of links from these top domains. This is fascinating:

It's practically logarithmic - the top domains have so many more links than those further down the list. It's little surprise that there's no movement in the top 10, and very limited fluctuation in the top 40. Earning links from tens of thousands of unique domains is extremely hard, but earning hundreds of thousands is a massive undertaking, and one that fewer than 75 domains on the entire web have achieved.

Looking forward to the interesting data you find here, as well!

p.s. This data is all sourced from Linkscape's latest index, which was released at the end of March.