Find Out Who Links to your Website

How do you find out who links to you website ?

Well the 3 main search engines all have different methods to show you public information. Remember with any of the search engines that this is the public information. For the majority of links you have the SEs will have found them and counted them in ranking your site.

There are some occassions where this will not be the case, so you might want to check the following:

- the page your link is on is not indexed

- the page your link is on is not linked to within the site in question

- the site owner has “rel-no follow” on the links (tells the robots not the follow that link - ie: discount it)

- the site owner has blocked the page in his robots.txt file and therefore discounts it

- the site owner has a meta = nofollow in his site code

Really, most site owners are honest and if you place a link on someone else’s site to your website then it will be counted towards your ranking. So how do you see who links to your site ? Try the following queries within each of the search engines:

Yahoo - type in linkdomain:www. yoursite.com - this will show all the links to your total domain. Yahoo has a really good tool now called site explorer which shows who links to which PAGE in your site. It really is worth spending time with the site explorer tool. Yahoo update their link information on a regular basis

MSN - type in link:www. yoursite.com - MSN seems to show absolutely everything which is great. I always simply go straight into MSN when I want some information on links. MSN update their link information almost on a daily basis.

Google - type in link: www. yoursite.com - it’s the same as MSN. However, Google has only shown what they want you to see. They only show a selection of links to your site so a) it’s probably a useless tool and b) they only update the data every 3 or 4 months.

I’d always use MSN to find link information.