How to count your site's inbound links by Mark Nunney, 15 August 2007
Inbound links are links from other sites to yours, and they are crucial in all but the least competitive of markets (and even in those you need some links). You therefore need to know how many inbound links your site has.
Best place to measure inbound links for your own site is within a Google Webmaster account.
If you don’t have the time or access rights to set up a Webmaster account, use Yahoo by searching with:
linkdomain:yourdomain.com - site:yourdomain.com
For example, for the site thinkingmanagers.com:
linkdomain:thinkingmanagers.com -site:thinkingmanagers.com
The following image shows that search and its result:
Although you can only use it on your own site, a Google Webmaster inbound links report (‘Pages with external links’ they call it) is superior, showing you which pages your inbound links go to.
The following image shows a Google Webmaster ‘Pages with external links’ report for thinkingmanagers.com:
For a comprehensive list of Wordtracker articles on topics including SEO, internet marketing and keyword research, click on Wordtracker Academy Articles.
About Mark Nunney
Mark Nunney (@marknunney) has been a successful professional SEO since 2000 and is CEO of The Website Marketing Company, although (apart from the link in this sentence) he's never optimized their website! He also publishes ThinkingManagers.com, the business management website which he optimized a bit a long time ago. With Wordtracker he is committed to teaching 'SEO for profit in the real world'. You can follow Mark Nunney's SEO on Twitter.
10 comments
I tried typing "linkdomain:yourdomain.com - site:yourdomain.com" and got results.
Then, I tried the Webmasters way, and it says there aren't any.
Any idea as to why that would happen?
Google and yahoo give different numbers for inbound links for your site. Which number you think is the more accurate? Also recently, I found out there are sites which have inbound links from yahoo to the tune of 35,000+. How do they do it? If inbound links count so much in SEO, no wonder beginners don't have a fighting chance!
Adam: Yahoo and Google are different search engines. Reads like one has found links the other hasn't.
Angelina: If you are referring to the links shown by Google on a non-webmaster search then Yahoo shows the most accurate links. If you mean to compare webmaster with Yahoo then I prefer webmaster for the detail.
35K+ links is nothing to be scared of if the links are not relevant to your target keywords. CNN and BBC websites have millions of inbound links but small sites beat them all the time in most markets. Relevance is key.
Mark I have read alot of the articals that have been posted on here and they are fantastic.
One question I have. Im taking your advice and will be writing articles full of keywords on key subjects to increase SEO. I planned on doing this on my blog which is external to my website. I will have a link from my website to the blog and vice versa. My question is if the blogs get the feedback I intend them on doing and poeple link to it, will this count as a link to my site? Or am I wasting my time with an external blog?
Try using a seo tool like http://www.smartpagerank.com, it shows the pagerank, nofollow and Anchor Text of the inbound links.
I am wondering the same thing as Michael Roby. Does a link to my blog, which is fully linked to my site, count as a link to my site?
Does anyone have any accurate sites that will count the # of links? Google is obviously not accurate and most of the sites provide widely different link counts. Thanks in advance.
Ontario Mortgage
you could also use link:youdomain.com in google
Fanda: yes but Google don't show many of a site's inbound links.