Checking backlinks

Checking to see who is Linking to your Site

I had a potential client ask me yesterday why he had no PageRank, yet he had 750 links pointing to his page and Google were recognising all of them and his site had been up for over a year, but he had never received any PR update.

The client had fallen into the trap that many people fall into when checking backlinks, by typing the following link search query into the search box:
link: www.hissitename.com instead of link:www.hissitename.com.

The difference being that he put a space between the colon and the first w, which doesn’t bring up all of the external links pointing at his site, it brings up all of the sites that feature hissitename on their pages.

Try it on your own site and you’ll probably see a major difference in the two. We use Alltheweb to check links, simply because Google don’t let you know all of the external links pointing at your site that they recognise, to deter you from buying links. If you type in link:www.msn.com into alltheweb, you’ll see that there are nearly 4.7m links pointing at the site. If you then put a space in between the colon and the first w, you’ll see that there are 14.3 million pages with MSN featuring on their webpages, but not necessarily linking to MSN.

Link Checking - The Technical Exlpanation

link:www.yoursite.com is a command that is recognised by the search engines. The engines recognise that you are asking for a list of incoming links.

link: www.yoursite.com is not a recognised command, so the search engine sees the query as link www.yoursite.com and produces the resuts for everything that they deem relevant to link and www.yoursite.com.