When people start link building campaigns, they want to be able to check their progress. Thanks to various websites who provide tools to see how many backlinks each site has (see the above articles), seeing that progress and your results is fairly easy to do. But, many people either use the tools improperly, use too many or too few tools, waste time, or just simply don’t use their full potential. Here are some tips to using backlink checking tools. 1. Don’t just use Google and Yahoo. Many people when checking their backlinks, go to Google and type in “link:YourURLhere†and they usually don’t see many results, and therefore get discouraged. Yahoo!’s “link:YourURLhere†search does return more results, but it’s still not complete. Don’t just rely on these resources. Google’s Webmaster Tools, and Yahoo!’s SiteExplorer tools will give better results, but still don’t just rely on these. 2. Use multiple tools to check. There are many different tools online that allow you to see how many backlinks your site has. But, they are not all created equal. Some use averages of major search engine numbers, Others don’t work with all search engines. Some provide you much more information such as your PageRank, your Alexa rank, the site your link is on’ PageRank, etc. Find 2 or 3 different tools that work the best for you, and stick with those. Sticking with just one won’t give you the most accurate, but using more than 3 or 4 will just be a waste of time. 3. Don’t compare one tool’s results to another tool’s results. Even though I suggest using 2-3 different tools to check your backlinks, that doesn’t mean that you should compare them against eachother. The best thing to do is to create a spreadsheet, or just a normal .txt document, and write down the results from each tool. Then, once a week, check your results again, and log it in the spreadsheet. Then you can see the progress you have made with each tool. 4. Don’t check multiple times a day, or even week. I know as a webmaster myself, that I want to check my stats multiple times a day. This is pretty useless, and a waste of time. Why waste your time checking your backlinks multiple times a day when you can focus your efforts on link building during that same time. If you focus on link building, you’ll be able to be more excited when you do check your results. Check maybe once or twice a week. You should pick a day, and check on that day every week. 5. Check your competitors backlinks. When you are checking your backlinks, it is a good idea to check your competitor’s backlinks too. Find out what pages they have links on and see if you can get links on the same pages. You can also check if they are steadily increasing their backlinks or not. If they are not, then you know they are just begging to be taken over in the search engine rankings. Author: Breakaway
I always thought that Google and Yahoo give the full backlinks results...What's more I usually check my competitors backlinks with Yahoo...It always gives a list with at least 100 names but they are frequently repeated...You suggest checking links with all the hige search engines??? Am I right??? P.S. Thanx for a good entry!