A pioneer in on-line commerce offered me some space on his site to post some of my FAQ files and gave me my own directory on his server. It didn't take me long at all to see that my link from a famous virtual library page about my site's subject had been copied on to several other Web sites, and the Yahoo link was very widely copied. I think the Yahoo code is how my site became known to the Point Survey Top 5 Percent Award people when I won their award. I have not publicized that site for two years now, but it still gets new links set up to it all the time . Many people writing Web pages copy links they see on other sites and put those links on their own sites.
Links propagate by plagiarism more than they propagate by bookmarking.
That site's provider didn't give me access statistics. By March of 1997 I had set up yet another commercial on-line service directory as my site, and that provider gave me access statistics. Quite a few people came over to the second site. But as I write this, there are still many more links, according to AltaVista, to old URLs of my site than to the current URL . I am appalled at how often I find pages, for example, by college students that purport to be original works of research that are actually stolen from a professional association, or family site link pages that copy Yahoo's directory pages verbatim, or other pages that engage in blatant plagiarism.