Finding the backlinks to your site using Yahoo's SiteExplorer
Writing about web page http://www.wmg.warwick.ac.uk
WMG has recently relaunched its branding and website. I was asked to help identify all of the links that other websites had made to the old site to try and repair all those that were broken. These links are often called backlinks or using Inlinks in the tool that I am to introduce.
I recommended Yahoo’s SiteExplorer as the most comprehensive and accurate on-line tool, http://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/
When you first enter your domain name into this tool it will show the pages that are cached on Yahoo’s databases. Click Inlinks to see the pages linking to your site.
To remove the internal links select ‘Except from this domain’ in the first option drop-down list.
On the second drop-down list you can choose ‘Only this URL’ (your home page) and ‘Entire Site’. Select both to find out the number of links to pages other than the home page.
If the links to your old home page are broken then all the link providers need to be contacted. When the links to the old home page are redirected then you need only contact those who link to the other pages.
I recomment re-using the domain and many of the old page addresses when changing websites. Indeed it is a very good idea to know the links to your website before making major changes.
Robert McGonigle
11 Jun 2007 10:49
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I fount that Yahoo siteexplorer is faster indexing web pages than Google ‘link:’
Is it true, or Google is hiding them AGAIN?
20 Jun 2007, 12:33
Robert McGonigle
I use info: with Google to find links, pages, cached page etc.
but the link: from this is just the same and under reports too.
The Sitereportcard tool uses “www.mediigate.com -site:www.mediigate.com”
but you would have to add “mediigate -site:www.mediigate.com” etc
to capture the varied link text
20 Jun 2007, 15:09
Rob McGonigle
That would explain how Google’s link: reports less inbound links that SiteExplorer.
Some quick testing using link:www.wmccm.co.uk shows unranked pages and the 2/10 KramBlog. Not reporting links under a threshold of PR and relevance is still quite possible.
Link:www.wmccm.co.uk gives about 140 links.
www.wmccm.co.uk -site:www.wmccm.co.uk gives about 1,290.
(This is the www.sitereportcard.com approach but to get them all you need to use
“West Midlands Collaborative Commerce marketplace” -site:www.wmccm.co.uk etc..)
SiteExplorer shows 461 links to the home page (excluding links from the same domain)
and a claimed 27,737 to all pages on the domain (1,000 max. will be displayed).
These include many of the alias pages that are generated by Blog sites but includes many excellent referral links that Google did not report.
18 Jul 2007, 17:21
Kammy
SiteExplorer is by far the best in checking the backlinks to your website, Google seems to pick and choose which ones to show – there are other tools however, such as seopro.com and their SEO Tool – Link Checker, but from my own experience Yahoo is much better.
Redirecting link is however a VERY tedious process, I wonder how you managed? Its not always possible to contact the owners and get them changed…I am assuming you redirect from the old site to the new one, which from what I know, is the second best option…
24 Jul 2008, 18:05
Rob McGonigle
Adding comments on old Blog posts PageRanked 3 or over is used to build backlinks. Kammy’s comment is an excellent example, a constructive and knowledgable post with a link back to the website he is promoting. As bestmobilephonecontracts does what it says then I have left this one. Bloggers should always enable email notification for comments and check where any links goes to.
25 Jul 2008, 10:06
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