A question I am frequently asked is: “How can I see which sites have added my link?”.
Quality inbound links are a major factor in search engine optimisation, so you’ll obviously want to keea tabs on this. However, not all search engines will disclose the full extent of your link popularity.
It’s a good idea to obtain an account with Google, Live/MSN and Yahoo! Registering for the ‘Webmaster Tools’ areas of these three search engines will allow you to view how many links are pointing to your site from elsewhere, when the engine crawled your pages, if any errors were found, and so on.
Google Webmaster Tools, in particular, provides a plethora of information. Just typing in “link:www.yourdomain.com” to see who’s linking will not cut it anymore. Google is quite secretive with inbound links so you need to register and authenticate your site. Yahoo! on the other hand displays a lot more information on inbound links. Typing in “linkdomain:www.yoursite.com” into the search bar will display both internal and external site information. Google may say you have 15 links, but Yahoo! may say “500?! A big difference!