In my last post I suggested that it might be a good idea to get everyone who links to your website to link in a consistent fashion. This is easy if you are the one adding the links to other sites, or if you specifically send url’s to your friends or place some ‘link to me’ text on your website, but what if you believe that other site owners have added links to your site but don’t know who? How do you find out who links to your website AND what url they are linking to?
Well, there are a number of ways….
- If you use Google Analytics (which I recommend) to monitor your website usage, you can take a look at your content report and see whether any of your pages are appearing more than once in different guises. For example, if you see people arriving at page ‘/’ and at page ‘index.html’ then that is likely to be the same page on your website, but treated as different ones by Google. This means that you are being linked to with the urls www.mysite.com and www.mysite.com/index.html.
- Use one of the many backlink checkers – just seach for ‘backlink’ checkers in any search engine. I have used http://www.useseo.com/backlink-analyzer.php, which uses the Yahoo API. This allows you to enter a specific url and then see the sites that link to that page.
