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.

Checking backlinks the right way

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