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Who’s Linking to You: Counting Your Backlinks

Have you ever wanted to find out who’s linking to you?

Carolyn just alerted me to a cool tool to do just that and more called Backlink and Anchor Text Tool. Not the sexiest name I’ve ever heard, but it’s certainly keyword-rich. (Ditto w/the developer’s name: We Build Pages.)

What I like:

  • It provides all the incoming links to any URL you give it. (Yours, your competitors’, etc.)
  • It provides the anchor text used on those Web pages. In other words, you’ll know if someone linked to your site with the words "world-class company" or "fly-by-night operation." Since search engines pay attention to the words in a link, you want your incoming links to use the keywords you’re targeting.

What I don’t:

  • It ain’t quick. You’ll have time to go get yourself a cup of coffee. Or brew yourself a new pot. Or, write an entire blog post.
  • I couldn’t find any specifics on how the reports are run. Do they pull from search engines (Google is notoriously for under-reporting backlinks) or use some other method?

Still, this is a great tool for:

  • Web site owners
  • SEO experts
  • Narcissists
  • People ready to make structural changes to their site.

Rich Brooks
917 Backlinks (and counting…)

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  • http://www.flyte.biz Carolyn Phillips

    Just a few more details on Rich's post. The text people use to link to you does matter, and this tool is great to see what kind of links to you exist out there, as the boss said. You don't want, however, for all links back to you to target the exact same keyphrase with the exact word order. You want to use as many related terms as possible.

    Relevance of the page the link is on is important too. You can click right from the report to the page that has the link and see what kind of page/link it is. I recommend having your Google toolbar up when you are doing this exercise so that you have some idea of the "trustworthisness" of the site that's linking to you.

    Another cool thing about the tool is you can transfer the data onto a spreadsheet, add another column on the right and use it as a checklist to contact the site owners and make changes a few at a time.

    The key factors are, again:
    * anchor text (avoid click here and images)
    * relevance of the page to the page it links to
    * link quality – how many other links are on the page, is it on a list with many, or is it embedded in an article about you and your product?
    * trustworthiness of the site that's linking to you.

    My .02 :)
    Carolyn

  • http://www.flyte.biz Carolyn Phillips

    Just a few more details on Rich's post. The text people use to link to you does matter, and this tool is great to see what kind of links to you exist out there, as the boss said. You don't want, however, for all links back to you to target the exact same keyphrase with the exact word order. You want to use as many related terms as possible.

    Relevance of the page the link is on is important too. You can click right from the report to the page that has the link and see what kind of page/link it is. I recommend having your Google toolbar up when you are doing this exercise so that you have some idea of the "trustworthisness" of the site that's linking to you.

    Another cool thing about the tool is you can transfer the data onto a spreadsheet, add another column on the right and use it as a checklist to contact the site owners and make changes a few at a time.

    The key factors are, again:
    * anchor text (avoid click here and images)
    * relevance of the page to the page it links to
    * link quality – how many other links are on the page, is it on a list with many, or is it embedded in an article about you and your product?
    * trustworthiness of the site that's linking to you.

    My .02 :)
    Carolyn

  • http://www.flyteblog.com Rich Brooks

    One more thing I don't like: it appears that the tool finds every incoming link to your domain name.

    In other words, you can't use it to find incoming links to a particular URL or even to a subdomain. I did a search for backlinks to http://business.mainetoday.com/smallbusiness/internetmarketing/ and got all links to mainetoday.com. Not helpful in this situation.

  • http://www.flyteblog.com Rich Brooks

    One more thing I don't like: it appears that the tool finds every incoming link to your domain name.

    In other words, you can't use it to find incoming links to a particular URL or even to a subdomain. I did a search for backlinks to http://business.mainetoday.com/smallbusiness/internetmarketing/ and got all links to mainetoday.com. Not helpful in this situation.

  • http://www.area51backlinks.com/buy-backlinks buy backlinks

    Hmm … they must have removed the tool, since it’s no longer on the site. But still some useful free tools on there, esp the spider view tool. Interesting what the spiders see on the other side.

Related posts:

  1. Who’s Linking to You? Who’s Linking to Your Competition?
  2. What Is Anchor Text?
  3. Incoming Links, Anchor Text and Google Rank
  4. Incoming Links: Get’em While They’re Hot!
  5. Six Reasons Why Blogs Are So Good for SEO

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 28th, 2007 at 4:50 pm and is filed under Search Engine Marketing, Web Marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.