Check Inbound Links

There are two ways of checking the presence of an inbound link. The first approach is to check the back links record held by the search engines. Go to the search box of Google, Yahoo or MSN and type “link:yoururl.com”*. A word of caution is that Google only shows a sample of the inbound links and that typically you will get much higher numbers for Yahoo and MSN links. Essentially you can use this approach to gather link information about any other web site. The results page for this query will provide the number of links and a list of sites. Some of the links will almost certainly be internal, i.e. from other pages within the same web site.

The second approach is to inspect the search engine’s index of the link’s originating site. This can be done for each of the major engines by using the following term “site:yoururl.com*”

• In each case enter the actual URL.

Related SEO Tips

Quality of Inbound Links
A popular web site that links to you prominently that itself has many inbound links

Relevance of Inbound Links
A search engine is likely to view a link from a semantically related web page as more valuable than a link from a random unrelated one

Importance Of Inbound Links
Regarding inbound links, two things are important for your website