How to find the number of backlinks pointing to your website

A backlink is simply a link sitting on another website that links to your website. They are also referred to as backward links, inlinks or inbound links.

Google uses an algorithm to determine where a web page is going to rank in their search engines. They use a number of factors as part of this algorithm but it is thought that the number of backlinks coming into a page is one of the most important.

To be more specific, however, it is not the number of backlinks but the quality of those backlinks that makes a page rank better than another. So the more quality links you have coming into a web page on your site the more likely that page will rank highly in Google. And the higher it ranks, the more traffic you are likely to get to your website.

In the words of Google, “In general, webmasters can improve the rank of their sites by increasing the number of high-quality sites that link to their pages.”

So with this in mind it might be worthwhile for us to be able to determine how many sites are actually linking to our website. There are a few ways to do this but you may find that each method may display different results. For one thing, Google doesn’t always display the correct number of links to your website. In the past, Google used to show only those links with a pagerank of 4 or higher. Today Google displays a random number of backlinks with varying pagerank and doesn’t display them all.

For this reason, Yahoo is a better choice to gauge the number of backward links coming into your site. However, we have still included instructions for both search engines below.

Any one of the following methods will provide you with your backward link numbers:

Using the Google Toolbar

To determine the number of backward links coming into your site use the Google Toolbar. If you haven’t installed this on your computer then do so now. It’s an important tool for internet marketers.

To view the backward links for your website take the following steps:

1. Open up your website in your browser.
2. Ensure that you have the ‘Pagerank and Page Info’ option available on your toolbar. It will look like this (circled in red in the image below):

If this feature is not displayed then go to Settings -> Options on the Toolbar and select the ‘More’ tab. Ensure that the ‘Pagerank and Page Info’ box is checked and click OK.

3. Click the drop-down arrow next to the pagerank icon and select ‘Backward Link’ from the options shown in the drop-down box.

Using Google Search

To find the number of backward links to your site using Google search take the following steps:

1. Go to www.google.com.
2. In the search box type in: link:www.yourdomainname.com

Be sure to change www.yourdomainname.com to the actual domain name of your website.

Using Yahoo Search

To find the number of backward links to your site using Yahoo search take the following steps:

1. Go to http://search.yahoo.com/
2. In the search box type in: link:www.yourdomainname.com

Be sure to change www.yourdomainname.com to the actual domain name of your website.

Using Google Webmaster Tools

As of February 2007, Google introduced a new facility as part of their Webmaster Tools to assist with backward link checking. The tool lists all of the incoming links to your website and allows you to see how many are linking in to a specific page on your website.

To view your links you will need to set up an account with Google and you can log in here.

Note : Google engineer Matt Cutts has indicated that just because a link is shown under Webmaster Tools doesn’t mean it carries any value.

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