Here’s a quick tip to help you see how many other websites or blogs are linking to your site or a competitors site. The reason these links (called inlinks) are worth checking out, is that they are one of the primary tools used by Google, in order to determine the authority and popularity of a site. So, whilst quality is important, the more inlinks your site has, the better.
Most professionals use the same tool to measure a site’s inlinks, something called Yahoo Site Explorer. By simply entering the URL of a site into Yahoo Site Explorer, you can see how many sites link to that URL. In the example below, I have entered the URL of my marketing blog and it shows 14,611 links pointing to it.
Quick guide to Yahoo Site Explorer
To get the most accurate inlinks results, I suggest you select the same settings as the image above. These settings will show you how many pages around the Internet link to pages on the site you want to check out. So, here’s what to do after you visit Yahoo Site Explorer and enter the URL you want to check into the Explore URL box at the top of the screen.
- Where is says, Show inlinks you should select the Except from this domain option and not the From all pages option. Otherwise, it will count the links from within the site you are checking, and what you are looking for here are links from OTHER sites and blogs.
- In the box to the right of the Show inlinks box, you should select the Entire site option. Otherwise, it will only show you links that point to your homepage.
By taking a quick look at the list of links pointing to the site you are checking out, you can also see the quality of the links that site’s attracting. For instance, if you have a little time and you are researching a competitor or a potential service provider, you can find out if they are generating most of their links themselves; by leaving comments on blogs / forums etc. You can also look to see if they are being linked to via link directories, a common SEO tactic used to bump up the number of links a site/blog gets.
Whether you want to get a quick idea of who is linking to you or you want to do some competitor analysis, Yahoo Site Explorer is a really useful resource. You will be surprised how many links some sites get (and don’t get.)
What tools do YOU use?
I would love to find out what other tools you use, to research inlinks. Please share them here, so your fellow readers can check them out.
There’s a perfectly good tool already available called Google!
Just enter link: followed by the page address you want to get the inbound link count for!
David
Hi David. Thanks for the suggestion.
However, doing that for every page on a blog or site would take hours, wouldn’t it?
I’ve never really found Google’s ‘link:’ feature to be particularly accurate either. It also lacks the features of Site Explorer – for instance (as far as I know) you can’t download the results direct into a spreadsheet. Just checked and Google currently, returns 40k plus inlinks just for the homepage http;//jimsmarketingblog.com of my marketing blog, which in reality only has a third that number.
Maybe it’s me, but Ive never found it useful.
Anyone using Google’s ‘link:’ feature, want to tell me what I’m doing wrong?
Googles link counter is screwy. It also counts all your own links not just the links from other sites. If you check those 40000 results Jim you’ll see that most are faked.
Click through the page numbers at the bottom of the screen and that 40000 will drop to just a few dozen.
Hello Mr Gannon!
Yep, just checked and you’re right.
Google shows 42,000 links but when I clicked through the page numbers at the foot of the page it actually only has 316!
Thanks Dale.
Site Explorer only shows you the first 1000 of your links and details them by page. There seems to be no way to see the additional inbound links.
It would be much more useful for overall link evaluation to show all the domains, or at least allow you to download the entire dataset rather than just 1000
Access to the full dataset would REALLY help. Thanks for the feedback David and thanks for stopping by the blog.
Hi Jim,
I just want to say that the article together with the comments are forming one interesting piece of information and I think many overlooked this tool from Yahoo.
Thank for mention it,
Toma
As always Toma, it’s great to see you pop by the blog.
You are right to point out the value of comments. The best thing about blogging, in my opinion, are the comments. The people who comment are priceless to any blogger and any blog.
Hi Jim,
I recommend downloading Quirk Search Status for Firefox users. http://www.quirk.biz/searchstatus/
From there, you can quickly check the backward links to a site on Google, Yahoo and Yahoo Site Explorer as well as other snapshot information about a website.
Its handy and very easy to you. It inconspicuously sits at the top of your browser with a little “q” icon and you just right click on it.
Great recommendation Nicola.
I have used Quirk Search Status for ages and find it especially useful for showing the Google PageRank of every page I visit.
Definitely worth installing!
FF also has an app. called SEQuake very simple to use & insall..
Noran Flecha
STRAIGHTALK´s last blog ..