Doood - 5:41 pm on Dec 21, 2002 (gmt 0)

Some search engines rank your site by link popularity, I think. I'm still a newbie after 15 months. My question is, is it the actual link they look at or is the text for the link? And if majority of links point to a different page than your homepage, will that page be ranked higher or your homepage? and will it help your homepage if other pages are heavily linked?

I used to get about 20 google/yahoo hits per hour to my index page but sometimes they would completely stop for a week or so and then start back up. Now SE hits are down to about 20 per day. I checked my server stats and saw that about 1000 sites link to my site this month and my third party stats say over 3500 sites link to me. With over 200k unique visitors so far this month (12/21) and only 20-100 search engine hits a day, it just doesn't seem right to me.

Is this normal? What do you think?