In search engine optimization (SEO) circles its a foregone conclusion that how many websites link to another website play a role in how well that site ranks on search engine result pages (SERPs). And, of offsite SEO factors influencing how a website ranks, the number and quality of links is at the top of the list.
So, it’s not surprising to me that clients often ask how they can find out what websites link to their site. Finding out isn’t difficult, and, ironically the best provider are search engines themselves. Today I’ll cover one free link research tool from Yahoo called Site Explorer.
Yahoo! Site Explorer
Yahoo Site Explorer can provide a few different pieces of information about your site, but we’ll focus on those inbound links.
- Go to http://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/
- At the top of the page, type your website address in and click the Explore URL button.
Site Explorer will return a list of links, but this isn’t the list of links that we’re looking for. This list is of links within the website address we provided. Let’s get the results we need. - Toward the top of the results there are two options labeled “Pages (247)” and “Inlinks (1,281)” (those numbers will differ for your website). The default selected option is “Pages,” but we want “Inlinks,” so click the “Inlinks” button.
Now you’re seeing a list of websites linking to your site, but we still have one more step. The list you’re looking it only shows the links pointing to your homepage, and we want to see links that point to any page on your site. - To the right of the button you just depressed, there is an option labeled “Show inlinks:” and two sets of options. In the first drop-down menu, select “Except from this domain” as we don’t want to see how pages on our site link to each other.
Once the page refreshes, select “Entire site” from the second drop down.
That’s it. You should now be looking at a link of websites which link to your site.
Limitations of Site Explorer
Depending upon how many links you have, you might not be able to see all of them with Site Explorer. The tool currently limits you to the first 1,000 links Site Explorer returns.
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Good job!!! I wish more people would have provided me with this type of information when I started out. I only found Yahoo Explorer after I had spent money on expensive software which does it’s job. Of course I didn’t have the money at the time . There are many free tools out there that can help those that are just starting out and you have covered one of the best in this article.
Thanks again for considering those that don’t have a great deal of money to spend!
Jagger