Linkbacks

April 30, 2004 10:22 AM

Can anyone show me to a good place to check how many/which sites link to my site?

I tried using link:[mysite] on Google, but it doesn't seem very reliable. Some links of which I've known for months don't even appear, others that still exist disappear, etc.
posted by NekulturnY to Computers & Internet (8 answers total)

Technorati.
posted by Skot at 10:42 AM on April 30, 2004

You can also check referrers to your website by analyzing your site's logs. If you don't have access to them, but have PHP, you can use the program Refer to see where your visitors are coming from.

(As a side note, the HTTP header HTTP_REFERER which these tools track is hilariously misspelled in the orignal specifcation, and lives on to this day for backwards compatibility reasons)
posted by zsazsa at 10:47 AM on April 30, 2004

Technorati completely stinks for my setup becuase www.falconred.net forwards to another site where the content is actually hosted. This causes technorati to think that every link on my own homepage from the hosted site to www.falconred.net is an "outside site" linking.
posted by falconred at 11:03 AM on April 30, 2004

Both Google & Technorati only show one link to my site, but I know for a fact there are at least a half-dozen more out there. Strange, considering that the links have been out there for a while and are on pages which are indexed by Google.
posted by tdismukes at 1:59 PM on April 30, 2004

Google's "link:" syntax differentiates between "example.com" and "www.example.com"; you might check to see whether those other links you know about use prefixes. I'm also not sure what it does about links to "example.com", "example.com/", and "example.com/index.html".
posted by gleuschk at 3:13 PM on April 30, 2004

altavista seems to be better for this than google, as its "link" matches any url for the domain, i think. try using
link:my.site.com AND NOT host:my.site.com
at their search
posted by andrew cooke at 3:43 PM on April 30, 2004

This causes technorati to think that every link on my own homepage from the hosted site to www.falconred.net is an "outside site" linking.

technorati is thinking correctly. every link on the hosted site to falconred.net actually IS an outside site linking. why not hang falconred.net on your actual site, instead of using that cheesy redirection scheme? (it's rhetorical question - i know the answer is because your host doesn't do that, or wants a bundle of money to do that. i just want to drive home the point that redirection services are not the best route to go, perhaps a host who can accomodate your needs is called for.)
posted by quonsar at 8:40 AM on May 1, 2004

The link:[mysite] search normally only shows pages that have at least a pagerank of higher than three.

if you do a search in Google for "domainname.com" or using whatever tld is applicable, you may find the rest of them.
posted by bragadocchio at 2:55 PM on May 1, 2004