Guide to Developing an Internet Business

Ways to Find Out Who is Linking to Your Site / Checking Your Backlinks

There is no single way I know of to check all the sites that are linking to your site, but if you try a variety of different commands you should be able to get a pretty good idea of how many total links your site has.

1. In Google, to find out who is linking to a page in your site, you would use the following command:

Of course you would substitute your own domain name for the www.pinecanyonmedia.com . This command will show you some of the sites that link to your home page. Google only shows a sample of the sites that they know about that link to your site, so most people have a lot more links than can be found using the Google link command. But at least it does show some of the sites that link to you, and lets you know that the links for these sites have at least been spiderable.

It is important to note that not all of the links Google shows may help your site with it's rankings. Many links like forum posts, free-for-all pages, links with "nofollow" tags, guestbook signatures and some blog comments are often shown in Google's backlinks but the reality is they may not have any impact on your site's rankings.

2. To check your backlinks in Yahoo, you can use the command:

This will show you probably most, but not all, of the sites that link to your entire site. To check links to a particular page through Yahoo, use the command:

Note that with Yahoo you need to use the "http" prefix for the link command for it to work and you do not use the "http" prefix for linkdomain command.

3. To check your backlinks in Alltheweb, use this command for the entire site.

Use this command to find links to a singe page:

Alltheweb is owned by Yahoo as of this writing. When I recently checked backlinks using Alltheweb for one of my sites, it showed only a small subset of the actual backlinks.

4. To exclude links from your own site you can usually add

to the end of most of the various link commands shown above.

5. You can also just try searching for your site name in quotes using a regular search box to find more backlinks. For this site I can search in Google for:

or

This will show me a list of sites that mention my site or its URL, though these mentions may not all be active, spiderable links.

Backlinks Via Google Webmaster Tools

You can sign up for a free account in in Google's webmaster tools for more information on backlinks. The advantages of using this service are an abundance of information about your site as Google sees it: a pretty complete list of backlinks, identification of any issues such as non spiderable pages, rankings reports and much more.

The downside is the privacy issue. If your site is privately registered, then once you register then Google knows who the owner is and also any other sites you own, if you include those sites in your webmaster account.