A lot of people I met who wanted to learn SEO asked me this question – how to find inbound link to a site? Therefore I thought I should write an article on this.
First thing first – what are inbound links?
For website A.com, the total of all links from other websites that link to A.com will constitute inbound link for A.com. Got it? Let me explain it in a simpler way:
Say B.com and C.com, both link to A.com, then A.com has 2 inbound links. But B.com is linked only from C.com, so B.com has 1 inbound link. I hope now the picture is clear.
Why webmasters give so much importance to inbound links is because of the well known fact in the SEO world that more the inbound links to a site, better is its rankings.
Inbound links is also known as backlinks, incoming links, inlinks, and inward links.
How to check inbound links using Google search engine?
Go to Google.com.
in the search box type:
link:www.sitename.com
[Where www.sitename.com is the domain name of the site you want to find incoming links for.]
And press enter.
You will see that Google will show
”Results 1 – 10 of about **** linking to www.sitename.com”
Note that there should be NO SPACE between “link” and “:” and “www.sitename.com”, else you may get incorrect result.
Example: Let’s find out how many inbound links Google.com has.
Go to Google.com.
in the search box type:
link:www.google.com
And press enter.
You may also click in the following link:
http://www.google.com/search?&q=link:www.google.com
You will see that Google will show
”Results 1 – 10 of about 330,000 linking to www.google.com”
It means Google.com has 330,000 inbound links.
[Result as on September 5, 2008. Your result may vary.]
NOTE: Google has a Google Webmaster Tools which can be found here. If you register with Google Webmaster Tools you can see how many inbounds links your site has.
To this first register with http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/
Then register your site.
Then go to
Dashboard > Links > Pages with external links
Google Webmaster tools will show which pages on your site have links pointing to them from other sites.
You can find more information here:
http://www.google.com/webmasters/
https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/docs/en/about.html
How to find inbound links using Yahoo search engine?
There are two ways to do it.
First one is exactly same as Google’s.
Go to Yahoo.com.
in the search box type:
link:www.sitename.com
And press enter.
You will see that Yahoo will show
”Inlinks 1 – 100 of about ****”
Example: Let’s find out how many inbound links Google.com has in Yahoo search.
Open Yahoo
In the search box type:
link:www.google.com
And press enter.
You will see that Yahoo will show
”Inlinks 1 – 100 of about 265,611,772”
It means according to Yahoo, Google.com has 265,611,772 links. You may be thinking why it is different than Google’s results. Its because both the search engines have different algorithms to calculate inbound links, so the results vary. For example Yahoo may count an inbound link from a small new site, but Google may not. (This is just an example to help you understand why the difference and therefore should not be taken seriously. Search engine algorithms are a closely guarded secret.)
Another and easy way to find inbound links using Yahoo search engine is this:
Go to Yahoo Site Explorer
http://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/
In the Yahoo site explorer search box type the domain name and click on the “Explore URL” button or just press enter.
Note that in Yahoo Site Explorer there is NO need to write “link:”, just type the full URL of the site you want to find the inlinks for.
For example to find incoming links for Google.com just type http://www.google.com in the Yahoo Site Explorer search box and press enter.
Yahoo will show all the pages indexed by Yahoo and inbound links for that site.
Hope you found this article interesting. Please help me to improve this blog. Your suggestions matter to me a lot. Please leave a comment.
Related topics:
1. How to Get Great Incoming Links
2. Is Reciprocal Link Exchange important?
Yahoo and MSN/Live are showing both links coming in from other sites and from Your own domain. It’s wise to exclude these links.
Jack http://seoapplied.blogspot.com/
The difference in inbound links that Google and Yahoo report is staggering. For instance, Google showed 102,000 in-bound links to cnn.com, whereas Yahoo showed 12,644,629. It would seem that, as @Jack implies, Google excludes links generated from within the site itself. Is that accurate to assume? And if that is the case, should we only use Google’s numbers for a real representation of truly external inbound links?
Hi Matthew,
Yes its true that Google excludes links generated from within the site itself – else webmasters would have linked their sites too many times within the site to “inflate” PR (page rank). This I think would have definitely irritated the search engines.
There is more to it. Google infact does not even count some incoming links from irrelevant pages, not very important sites / pages, and incoming links from the same IP. Google stopped counting incoming links from the same IP when webmasters bought many domains on a shared host and linked them internally to increase the PR.
I hope you understand that its not that easy to buy many domains and host websites in different IPs (or different webhosts). Though its not impossible.
Let me also tell that for some strange reason Yahoo Site Explorer is a very popular tool among webmasters. Though personally I feel Google gives an accurate estimate of inbound links.
So to answer your question, it’s a good idea to use Google to know the real inbound links to your site, nonetheless does it harm to check what Yahoo Site Explorer says about your site? After all many webmasters will check Yahoo before giving your site a link.
Hope that helps.
Very interesting. Thanks for the insight. I went through quite a few backlinks that Yahoo listed, and while they did seem “insignificant” they were valid, so it’s surprising how much of a difference in the numbers there is between Google and Yahoo. I’d be curious to see what Google considers “significant” in order to count as one of their backlink pages. Then again, Google isn’t really forthcoming with their algorithms.
I am doing a research on page ranking but couldn’t explain the huge difference between Google and Yahoo results on inbound links. For example, Google showed 23,000 in-bound links to http://www.google.com, whereas Yahoo showed 240,759,511 as of July 18,2010. Would anyone have a reasonable explanation?
Thanks for the help.
Omar,
It may be because of the way Google and Yahoo calculate the inbound links. For example if you post a article in an article directory with PR Zero – Yahoo may consider the link an inbound link whereas Google may not consider it as an inbound link. Remember this – Google is more *strict* in considering and accepting an inbound link.