Checking Your Site’s Inbound Links

March 16, 2009 // Author: Jacob Stoops // 64 views // View Comments
Checking Your Site’s Inbound Links
Tips to help you check your site's inbound links.

In this article, I want to explain how to find the number of inbound links to your site and explain their importance.

Inbound links, the number of site’s linking to your site, is an important factor in search engine rankings. Having lots of inbound links can actually help your search engine rankings indirectly and can also improve your site’s traffic.

Inbound links are extremely valuable to your SEO campaign, and you need to be sure to focus your efforts in this area.

Numbers vs. Quality

Not only are search engines looking for sites with a lot of backlinks, they are looking at the “quality” of the inbound links as well. The way I see it, what good is having tons of links if none of them are of high-quality?

There are a few factors that go into determining if an inbound link is “quality” or not:

  1. Can Webcrawlers Follow It? Many links on the web use the nofollow command, which keeps the search engines from passing along the ever-valuable link juice to your site.
  2. Does it Use Good Anchor Text? Search engines often use a hyperlink’s anchor text to make assumptions on a site’s topic. That is why it is very important for a link to your site to contain good anchor text. For example, I search engine would most likely rank a site with many inbound links using the text “SEO Tips” over a similar site with inbound links that say “Click Here”.
  3. Is It from a Well-Respected Site? Search engines value links from sites that it deems reputable rather than sites that are questionable. Also, links from sites with high PageRank are optimal too.
  4. Is It from a Related Site? Search engines like when sites that are related to yours link to you. For instance, for this site, a link from another SEO Blogger would probably be more valuable than a link from Joe’s Pizza Palace (all things being equal).

Checking Your Links

Finding your total number of inbound links can actually be quite simple. You can do it manually or you can use free software online that will help give you a rough estimate.

To do it manually, simply go to Google, Yahoo or MSN and type in link:www.yoursite.com and this will show you how many sites link to you.

Keep in mind that this is a totally imperfect process. For instance, Google is a little buggy when it comes to showing your site’s total number of links. Yahoo Site Explorer sometimes displays pages on which no actual link to your site can be found.

Overall, I recommend using Yahoo! Site Explorer to do a manual link check, as it seems to display the most accurate results.

Helpful Tools

Here are some helpful tools to check your inbound link numbers & quality:

Hope this helps!

Update: In January 2010, SEOMoz launched another excellent tool for analyzing link popularity and backlinks called Open Site Explorer – which I strongly recommend!

Photo Credit: Darwin Bell on Flickr

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  • Doesn't Wordpress have an "inbound link" tracker integrated into the admin panel? I've yet to see it work to full capability, as i'm certain there are inbound links for some of my clients, yet they don't show on that WP tracker.

    Eliminate this target for me would you?
  • Oops! Typo. It's fixed now.
  • We should use link:www.yoursite.com to check how many sites link to us instead of site:www.yoursite.com
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