Track incoming links – How to know when someone links to you

So how often do you check for incoming links to your site? I must admit that I keep an eye on incoming links like a hawk. I believe most people have a special liking to incoming links, and boy, they have all the reasons to. Don’t they?

So how often do you check and where all do you check for incoming links? Do you keep record of them? Do you accept all or do you keep away from some?

I normally get alerted by the Wordpress engine when someone links to me. They come up as track backs on the comments approval area. Most of us would be relying on this method. But is it always relevant and correct? I trust many of us get more than spam links than genuine ones. And especially when there are more “splogs” appearing, it is not surprising that we get linked from them every now and then.

One thing I’ve noted over time is that whenever I use the term “Google” in my post titles, soon after the post is published, I’d get a couple of incoming links, and all of them would be splogs.

Splogs are engineered in such a way that whenever there’s a reference in the blogosphere for a certain set of keywords (like the term Google), they immediately catch hold of the blog and link to it with their automated mechanism. And this many of them time is along the lines of -

Your article title here…
I found this interesting information written by (Tom/Dick/Harry), see original article here(your link)

Well, that’s not what I’m talking about here. Where do you look for incoming links?

1. Google – Search term (link:www.yoursite.com)
2. Yahoo! – Search term (linkdomain:www.yoursite.com)
3. Google blog search – Search term (link:www.yoursite.com)
4. Technorati

Are there any other places that you’d look for incoming links? Any way,the most important guy here is Google. And if you’d like to be alerted whenever someone(who is indexed on Google) links to you, here’s a shortcut.

1. Go to Google Alerts (www.google.com/alerts)
2. In the search term field, give (link:www.yoursite.com)
3. In the type field, select “Web” (third option)
4. In the “How often” field, select “As it happens” (second option)
5. In the email field, give in your email.

That’s it. Now whenever, a site that’s indexed on Google links to you, you’ll get an alert mail in your inbox. So you don’t have to go always checking for incoming links on Google. Clever isn’t it?

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