Checking backlinks the right way
How is the correct way to check backlinks?
This is what I have learned from own observations and I feel like it would be good to share.
First I can tell you that Google only shows a random fraction on the backlinks they know of - so it is totally useless using Google for this purpose. Probably the reason for this is because they don’t want to reveal this info for some reason.
Per my experience MSN is best for this purpose. It picks up new backlinks the fastest and also shows all of them.
Do a link:onedomain.com on MSN Search.
Using this method MSN tend to list the ones with the most (not highest PR) backlinks at the top of the list. This example is not good to see this but check one with more backlinks and you will see.
Then it says:
“Page 1 of 498 results containing link:onedomain.com (0.36 seconds)”
Does it mean that there are 498 sites linking to onedomain.com? - no it doesn’t. It is web pages, not sites.
A search engine only counts a limited amount of links from the same IP to one site (maybe 5-20) the rest are devalued. So if a site in the above example had 300 pages and on all of them there was a link then 300 in the above number would come from that 1 site.
So how do you know how many unique sites are linking to you?
Use this MSN query: http://search.msn.com/results.aspx?q=link%3Aonedomain.com&first=1500 and look at the number that has now changed. It says 71 and that is how many uniques sites are linking.
But there is a flaw, MSN only shows results from the first 25 pages so if there are more than 250 unique sites linking the above method does not work.
Then you do this solution:
Go to: http://www.helpfulinformation.org/seo-tools/anchortext.pl (bookmark it) and type the domain name with www. Look at the number at the bottom - there it is.
Checking backlinks the right way is a must for any SEO, hope you learned something useful in this article.
Good luck and get some more backlinks!
EDIT, Added January 12, 2006:
There is an excellent tool I just found that is a very simple software called The Tattler provided by WebGuerilla and can be downloaded here.
It is very fast and uses the Yahoo index to check backlinks, unique domain IPs and can export it to Excel files, thanks Greg!
EDIT, Added April 12, 2007:
You can also use the Backlink Watch which is a very good tool.
If you found this page useful, consider linking to it.
Simply copy and paste the code below into your web site (Ctrl+C to copy)
It will look like this: Checking backlinks the right way
[…] Link power and how it works (PageRank) You need to understand such things like how link power flows through a site (so you can make good internal navigations) and how search engines uses links as a voting mechanism and how it works. This includes working with online SEO tools and querying search engines for measurements. You need to know the difference between toolbar PageRank and real PageRank and that PageRank is just one out of 100 factors used in ranking. […]
Pingback by SEO Professional? SEO subjects you need to know — October 28, 2006 @ 7:31 am
Post Navigation by Category
Good find Jim!
This is the stuff I am always searching to find!
Thanks
I will make a lot more of similar posts in the future.
Happy new years Marcus.
Good Tool
Very good link thankyou.
Oh great i checked and got 36 unique backlinks is that good and if not whats a good number ?
Over 500 is good IMO. Over 700 then you are talking.
Thanks
good links
Awesome! That is much better than using Google lol
Jonathan
cool usefull info tnx!
BackLinkBot - a system for searching for, check and ranking the inverse references. Available searching for on Aport, Mail, Rambler, Yandex, Google, Lycos, MSN, Yahoo. Work from localhost and with server Unix. Quick algorithms of the work, minimum load to system.
Thanks man. They are very useful for my sites.
hey the msn link: operator is not working any other suggestions??
Yes, MSN turned off the ability to check backlinks.
Use yahoo instead. Example:
http://search.yahoo.com/search;_ylt=A0o………p;ei=UTF-8&x=wrt
Very helpful information you`ve provided, thanks. It`s such a pity that the big search engines seem to want webmasters to jump through hoops to get accurate stats of links etc.
Hey great blog, I’m always using yahoo to check back links, for my ip address it shows no of back links, if i check it out with different ip address it shows more back links. moreover if i put back slash to my domain name , it show the particular no of back links, if i didn’t put back slash it show different. i’m very much confused about this problem, After read your blog only i can able to take decision, thanks for you and msn , you wrote very informative blog , sure it will help others like me, i’m excepting more informative blog from you.
Hello everybody. Thanks for a great blog. The Msn does not work for me? Anyone knowing the reason?
Many thanks for that. It`s helped me understand a few things re links.