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December 13, 2007

How to Find Out Who is Linking to Your Web Site

Hard-core link analysis can seem technical and geeky if you're new, but don't pick up the slide rule just yet! Free automated tools like Yahoo Site Explorer actually make link analysis as simple as clicking a button.

Your goal is to quickly determine who's linking to your competitor so you can replicate as many of your competitor's high-quality links as possible. Yahoo Site Explorer (YSM) can evaluate links just to a site's homepage or to any other single page on the site, or view all the links to all the site's pages at once. You can also view links just from other sites, or include links from the internal pages on site you're evaluating.

We're interested just in who's linking to our competition, so we'll focus on external links. If we wanted to see who was linking to CNN.com, we'd enter their domain in Yahoo Site Explorer and click Explore URL.



This would first show us a list of pages indexed from that site. To see incoming links, we'd then click the Inlinks link.

Yahoo will now list incoming links roughly in order of importance. This is a great feature since it clusters the best links near the top and cuts down the time spent scrolling through a site's incoming links.


We can then use the available drop-down menus to limit this list just to external links. Adjust the menus so that they now say Show Inlinks Except from this domain to Only this URL.



This will show us external links just to the CNN Homepage. If we want to see links to the site as a whole, set the menus to Show Inlinks Except from this domain to Entire Site.


Once you're able to see who is linking to your competition, you next need to determine why they're linking to them. Then formulate a plan for getting them to link to you. But it all starts with using the Yahoo Site Explorer to evaluate the top 10 or 20 sites ranking for each of your keywords and unearthing the wealth of link building possibilities.

A more advanced tutorial on link analysis with Yahoo is given in the SearchEngineNews.com report:

How to Analyze Competitor Sites So You Can Better Optimize Your Own

You can also view a number of your competitors' important link-related metrics by entering their domain with the Site Strength Indicator Tool (login with your SearchEngineNews.com Email and this month's Password). This tool not only gives you the Yahoo Site Explorer data listed above but also list factors such as links from .edu and .gov domains, listings in authoritative directories and much more.

You can also install the SearchStatus plugin in your Mozilla browser in order to easily see the Google PageRank, Alexa rank and Compete ranking for any site you're on, along with highlighting of nofollowed links and other important data.

What about Google?
In case you're still fairly new to SEO and are wondering why we don't use the Google link command to do competitive link analysis, it's because Google provides terrible link data. Yahoo's data is much more complete and reliable. You can get pretty good link data for your own sites by registering them with Google Webmaster Central. However, that tool only lets you check links for your own sites, not your competitions'.

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