What’s the best way of finding all the existing links to your site? It’s widely acknowledged that Google doesn’t show all the links when you do a “link:www.yoursite.com” search. Dave Hawley said that Google confirmed to him that they only ever shows a sample of the links to a given site.
Share your favorite link checking tools in WebProWorld.
Jestep, another WebProWorld member, said, “Google doesn’t show a sample. It generally shows only links with PR4 or higher.”
“That is genearlly true but not totally,” said Dave Hawley, “Google often omits showing links from pages with > PR 4.”
So how can you tell how many sites there are linking to yours? That’s the question that started this thread in WebProWorld.
Braknews offered this tool from webmaster-toolkit: http://www.webmaster-toolkit.com/link-popularity-checker.shtml.
It saves searches Google, Altavista, MSN, AllTheWeb, and Yahoo simultaneously, which may give you a little more balanced idea of how many sites are actually linking to yours.
For example, Google shows Murdok as having 1,860 links to it, while Yahoo shows 98,000.
Mel suggested the free desktop application here: http://www.checkyourlinkpopularity.com/. I didn’t try this software myself, but Mel says that, “this tool will check, record and rank the link popularity of multiple domains, allowing you to compare them easily.”
The drawback, he says, “is that it does not yet support Yahoo, which IMO is the search engine which gives the most comprehensive listing of links.”
Dave Hawley suggested the MarketLeap link checker: http://www.marketleap.com/publinkpop/default.htm
Mac 5 suggested this one:
http://www.widexl.com/remote/link-popularity/index.html
Thanks to WebProWorld for the resources.
Garrett French is the editor of Murdok’s eBusiness channel. You can talk to him directly at WebProWorld, the eBusiness Community Forum.
