How to Check Your Backlinks

Google Webmaster Console (http://www.google.com/webmasters) -

Webmaster console is probably the most accurate source for backlink checking .Google had released a “Webmaster console” to help Web site owners to view statistics like:

• who links to your site
• which Google searches most frequently bring up your site,
• which pages from your site Google was able to crawl,
• what errors the indexer encountered

The big downside is that you can check backlinks for your own websites only.

Yahoo SiteExplorer (http://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com) -

it’s a good resource for web site owners to gain insight into their site’s presence in Yahoo! The tool shows which of the site’s pages are indexed and which pages are linking to the site (inbound links).

Using Site Explorer is as simple as entering a URL into the search form. Site Explorer accepts a URL instead of search terms. A list of all URLs indexed for the domain and all sub domains are presented in the results, but if desired, this can be limited to the primary domain only.

You can see up to 1000 backlinks for every domain but results include no-follow links as well. You can also export backlinks to TSV file (like CSV but separated with tabs), but only a current page.

SEO Elite, Backlink Analyzer etc.(http://www.seoelite.com) -

These tools can help you with digging up backlinks from search engines in an easier way. You don’t have to manually check every page in Google/Yahoo as this tool compiles a report with backlinks along with other useful information like Google Pagerank, Alexa rating etc.

Google alerts (http://www.google.com/alerts) -

This is a less known one. You can set Google Alerts on your domain like - http://www.yourwebsite.com and Google will send you an email when the link is found somewhere on the web. This is a cool way how to check for new links but Google will report also pages where only your website is mentioned but no real link is present.

The disadvantage of this method is that Google Alerts are not as accurate as they could be, sometimes emails are not being sent, and even Google have indexed a page with the link.

Google Allinanchor command -

This is not very known trick. Using allinanchor command with your website name you can get quite a lot of backlinks for your site. The advantage is that using that method you can get links which were not reported by Google link command or Yahoo! site explorer e.g.

allinanchor:www.yourwebsite.com or allinanchor: yourwebsite