A site that’s online isn’t much of a site unless people go to it. The raw visitor stats that services like Analytics and Quantcast provide sometimes aren’t enough for gauging the traffic flow to a site. A “link” is a fundamental way in which visitors reach a site, and direct links (typing in the web address) and search engines are the two other ways. Of course, there’s “good company” and “bad company” online that could be linking to you. I’m not going to discuss right & wrong in this article, but I will go over how to be more aware of one factor that affects all sites… backlinks.
Which method is best?
There’s a few different ways to find who’s linking to a site. Some are tools made available by search engines like Google while some are various services that are available online.
Google’s link: command (perfect for URL-specific stats)
Using link: as part of a Google search will list the webpages that have links to that specified webpage. For instance, link:www.google.com will list webpages that have links pointing to the Google homepage. Note there can be no space between the “link:” and the web page url. It’s also important to know that this finds the backlinks for that one URL, and doesn’t provide matches for every URL on the site. By the way, you can use the number of matches below the search box to get a rough number for assessing the online penetration of that webpage.
Google Webmaster Tools (perfect for site-wide stats)
As part of Google’s Webmaster Tools, they have “Your site on the web” => “Links to your site” in the side navigation that shows backlink stats for a site as a whole. Essentially, this provides:
- A list of sites and what pages they’re linking to
- Which page is being linked to the most
- The terms being used for the links
- and you can get fairly granular with each data set
Everything else
The above methods obviously depend on what Google has indexed, and similar tools are available using Bing and other search engines so one can diversify their data set. There’s also a great service from SEOmoz called Open Site Explorer that’s worth looking into.Unfortunately, searching for a tool that accumulates these stats resulted in finding a lot of adware/junk sites so your mileage may vary depending on the service being used.
Knowing who’s linking to a site a good way to understand what sort of company that site is involved with, and this can be helpful when working with the public relations & marketing for a website. It’s also a decent way to see what others are saying about a particular site, but do keep in mind that this is just one way that websites establish a connection with one another.