3 replies to this topic

[bobmeetin]

As we all know links from external sites back to yours is important. What is sometimes a little difficult is obtaining quality back link information. I looked through many of the other posting for morsels of info to help here.

Some of the methods grab all including internal links (links from your site to another page on your site) and count them in the reports. This method is worthless.

Many methods found on the internet count links from external sites to yours, but don't unique the sites. In other words, if the same sites has links to yours but from different pages, this method doesn't eliminate the additonal pages. Here are some example sites with back link check forms/methods that do this:

https://siteexplorer...hoo.com/mysites
http://www.marketleap.com/publinkpop/
http://checkbacklink.com/
http://www.seo-guy.c...-popularity.php
https://www.google.c...ebmasters/tools (download as spreadsheet available)
http://www.seoadmini...k-exchange.html (windows only local app)

Better but no seegars. With some of these you can export a report, perhaps a spreadsheet, and finagle your way through to uniquing the results. The information is there, just needs massaging. Remember - unique back links is the goal here.

Another method of checking backlinks is to go to google and in the search field enter the name of the website along with -site:website as in:

www.mysite.com -site:www.mysite.com
www.dottedi.biz -site:www.dottedi.biz

The "-site" option is supposed to tell the search engine to exclude redundant iterations. Somewhere I hink on this forum I read that "Backlinks only show up in Google if the linking page has a certain level of PageRank". perhaps 4. So the results are debatable.

Visiting google or your fav search engine and entering, "www.mysite.com" should bring up every page known to mankind where your site is linked to. Too much info though and have no idea of its accuracy.

Another option which is notoriously known to be broken in google is to visit google and enter:

link:www.mysite.com

I only mention this for fodder value. Know it but don't use it. So, on to the question and the goal...

Are there any reliable, reasonably accurate tool, websites, etc., which you can us to check for links from unique websites back to yours?

-Bob

[Michael Martinez]

You'll find there is more than one opinion on whether there are good tools for this.

In MY opinion, there are no good tools. None of them can tell you what any other source of information knows. Using database Alpha to analyze database Beta is just plain nuts.

[Jill]

Try SEOMoz's new Linkscape tool. As well as Google's Webmaster Tools.

[bobmeetin]

It took a little footwork, but I took some time and ran a number of back link checking tests against a sampling of web sites and made it into a table which you can view at: Backlink Checking Tool Comparison Table

The long and short of it is that Michael seems to have hit the nail on the nose. The results I obtained through this tedious process just kind of make you wonder. The goal, again, is to obtain a list of unique sites (not just pages on sites) with back links. I suspect that if you took the time to download the results and manually uniqued the data you might get some acceptable results for several of the methods. However, my gut feeling is that the public linkscape method is probably the best requiring the least effort.