Track incoming links – How to know when someone links to you
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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?
Mani,
Thanks for this mini tutorial. Sometimes I am surprised to find an older link that had gone unnoticed. This should fix that problem!
Neena’s last blog post..Google’s Blogger Now Allows Links to All Commenters
That was a useful info.. thx
Niyaz PK’s last blog post..Microsoft Asirra and Inkblot: Are they worth it?
But link:www.yoursite.com may not give all the links for a site on a real time basis…
The best place to check for incoming links as per google is Google Webmaster tool…
Techblissonline Dot Com’s last blog post..Use windows process explorer utility to explore your computer/PC processes
You are right rajesh, but in that case, whoever knows how to use Webmasters are supposed to know the deep secrets of link building. This one was meant to the average blogger who does not want to try hard, but prefer spoon feeding.
link command only provides a sampling of backlinks…and google does not want this information to be available to all except the site owners…
Techblissonline Dot Com’s last blog post..Use windows process explorer utility to explore your computer/PC processes
Very clever! Gonna use that one!
A much simpler place to find incoming links is in your web logs.. assuming anyone ever uses them, and if they don’t, why would you care?
If you lack the skill to extract this yourself, free tools like Google Analytics will slice and dice this stuff six ways from Sunday..
Yet another cool tip from you. Thanx.
It was very useful to me…..thanks mani
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Mani,
Technorati has a very good way of providing the links to your site which they appropriately have named as “Reactions”. I regularly see the reactions to my blog through this link
http://technorati.com/blogs/techtracer.com?reactions
If you want to check yours then simple replace the blog name in the above link.
I have found it to be useful since it lists down the links even which don’t appear on my blog as trackbacks.
If I know of an external link pointing to my site, and it does not show up in Google Webmaster tools, what might be the reason? I can see the external link by going to the site that is linking to me, but Google does not see it (but Googlebot is crawling the external linking site).
You might be rushing through. Even if the site thats linking to you is indexed, based on its crawl freuency and various other factors (sandbox blah blah) it might take some time before the link is tracked. you might have to wait. Alternatively, try sourcing a link from a more frequently crawled and older site. Let me know what happens.
Hi, Guys. I accidently stumbled upon this site. I was looking for better ways to check my back links. Great information and for a change no advertisers under the comments. The comments was in fact just as usefull.Going to look for my reactions right now.
I use the google alerts method to track incoming links for my site and competitor sites. It’s not perfect, it doesn’t track hits from stumbleupon, digg and a variety of other sites.
Webmaster Tools does work for your personal site but I haven’t found something to track competitor sites.
Green – This method will only track the links that are listed on Google backlinks, it’s not a replacement to track all the backlinks but only the ones that are of interest to Google SEO. You wil have to use other tools like backlinkswatch.com to check for all your backlinks.
How do I determine which incoming links are spammish? I write useful content in other blogs and do a lot of article marketing. I don’t do link farms or anything like that. Will that limit my spam incomings? I don’t want google to frown on my site.
Thanks so much for this posting I was wondering if Alexa had some kind of RSS feed that will do this, but once again Google trumps. For SMO, the strategy lists reward inbound links. However, didn’t know how to catch links other than trackbacks.
I’ve tried this method, but what I noticed it that it doesnt show all the results with the url.. and even technorrati shows only the blogs registered with technorati.. wish there was a backlink alert tool more consistent than google alerts.. thanks anyway
The search term “link:www.yoursite.com” doesn’t get all the back links to your website..Google webmaster tools is slightly better to use : https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/
nice tip. but google webmaster tool is giving better result
Useful info for backlinks although I couldn’t get it to work in Google?