Continuing on our recent theme of acquiring backlinks?
Back Links
Backlinks or “back links” are links other webmasters provide you from their websites to your website, thus the word back. In our last article post we provided a template to help you solicit a back link or a link exchange with other sites. In this post we hope to provide you some background information on how to figure out how many are directed to your site.
Checking backlinks using Google Search
The old standard way is to type link:yoursite.com into the Google search field, however for more reliable results, type the following command:
yoursite.com -site:www.yoursite.com -site:yoursite.com
(Remember to replace “yoursite.com” with your actual domain name … D’OH!.)
The results will also identify sites that mention your site but may not necessarily link to it so do not get to excited on the # of results. Caveat: Google never discloses all so it likely is not 100% accurate but is reflective.
Checking backlinks using Yahoo Search
Into the search box add:
link:http://www.yoursite.com -site:www.yoursite.com
This search excludes internal links. Here’s a refinement. For more results, try this search:
linkdomain:www.yoursite.com -site:www.yoursite.com -site:yoursite.com
The above search includes links to ALL pages on your site, not just the main page.
How to determine backlinks to an individual page
Yahoo: link:http://www.yoursite.com/page
MSN: link:yoursite.com/page
Google: yoursite.com/page.html -site:yoursite.com
Checking backlinks using MSN Search
link:yoursite.com OR
link:yoursite.com -site:yoursite.com or linkdomain:yoursite.com
which shows pages that link to ALL pages on your site.
Here is a link to our other post which will provide you a sample link exchange letter. You may also find this link building post informative. We will save Track Backs for another day….until then Happy Domaining!
