Backlinks to Your Website

Backlinks are incoming links to a website. A high number of backlinks mean an indication of the popularity of the site and/ or its importance. It is also known as incoming links, inbound links, inlinks, and inward links.

Backlinks are very important, especially in search engine optimization because search engines like Google and Yahoo, will give more credit to a website that has good quality backlinks, and are most likely to consider websites which are more relevant to search queries.

When search engines calculate the relevance of a site to a keyword, they consider the number of quality inbound links to that site. But what is an inbound link? When site A links to site B, site A has an outbound link and site B has an inbound link. Inbound links are counted to determine link popularity, an important factor in SEO. We should not be satisfied with simply getting inbound links; it is the quality of the inbound link that matters most.

How to check your backlinks? Here are the ways of checking your backlinks:

Google webmaster Console (http://www.google.com/webmasters)- It is an absolute reader for checking backlinks. Webmaster console is probably the most accurate source for backlink checking. The big disadvantage is that you can only check backlinks for your own websites. Also, some people say that its another way for Google how to get more information about your site. If you are doing something dishonest, be careful.

Yahoo Site Explorer (http://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com)- If you don’t have access to the webmaster console, then Yahoo is your tool. It’s not as accurate as Google webmaster console but still good enough. Seeing up to 1000 backlinks for very domain, but results include nofollow links as well.

Google Allinanchor command – Using Allinanchor command with your website name you can get quite a lot of backlinks for your site. Advantage of this is that, using that method you can get links which were not reported by Google link command or Yahoo siteexplorer

SEO Elite, Backlink Analyzer (http://tools.seobook.com/backlink-analyzer), (http://www.seoelite.com) – These tools can help you with digging up backlinks from search engines in an easier way. You don’t have to manually check every page in Google/Yahoo as this tool compiles a report with backlinks along with other useful information like Google Pagerank, Alexa rating etc.

Alternative search engines – There are other search engines that can give you information about backlinks:

MSN – uses link operator like G or Y – link:http://www.yourwebsite.com

Exalead – uses link operator like G or Y – link:http://www.yourwebsite.com

These search engines can give you sometime a backlink which is not reported by Yahoo Siteexplorer, but mostly its waste of time.