Up to now, the World Wide Web (WWW) grows into a large hyperlinked corpus with more than 800 million pages and 5 600 million hyperlinks. Moreover, it is obviously impossible that any global ‘planning’ can be imposed on the creation of such a corpus. This brings some challenges to many research fields on the World Wide Web. On the other hand, the hyperlinked Web pages in the networking environment can be a very rich information source for daily or business use, provided people have effective means for understanding the Web. Linkage analysis is playing more and more significant role in many fields on the World Wide Web. Recent advances about the relevant research and application of linkage analysis of World Wide Web are presented in this paper. In particular, some results and achievements about linkage analysis and its applications on Web searching, Web community discovery and the Web modeling are surveyed here.