Find Out How Many Links You Have to Your Hubs, Blogs or Websites

Building a website or a blog is hard work. It's can be time consuming and frustrating, but overall can be very, very rewarding. Once you've built it, the work you put into never seems to end, but the little steps you take and the milestones you make are what makes it all worthwhile. One of the larger milestones is when other websites and blogs start linking to yours. Incoming links to your site means you are gaining a web presence, and that is the one of the biggest rewards you can reap! Finding out who is linking to your site can be a bit tricky. Many sites you can search to find out where your backlinks are coming from are not really accurate. You can also check who is linking to your site manually, but that can turn out to be less than accurate, too.

Page One or Die: The Hidden Truth Behind Getting Your Website on Page One of Any Search Engine

Backlinkcheck.com is a very accurate, free backlink checking tool. There are two catches, though, but they are really insignificant. First, they only show the top 100 relevant websites that are linking to your site, and second, you can only search 5 sites per hour. If you write for hubpages, it will show all of the rss feeds your hub is on, which is kind of cool! So far, this one is my favorite.

Yahoo! Site Explorer is an excellent way to check your incoming links.  Yahoo has several tools available to help with indexing your website on Yahoo!.  I highly recommend using the Site Explorer.  All you need to do is enter the URL of your hub, blog or website into the search box.  It's as easy as searching for something on the web!

A link checking website that I found to be highly recommended, but not as accurate as I'd like, is Backlink Watch. They have a lot of annoying ads that pop up in the middle of the screen, but all you have to do is click on "Close this thing" at the bottom of the ad. There links are cached, so the backlinks they return may not be as updated as you'd like to see them.

iWebtool is another free backlink checking site. This one gives you 10 free backlink searches per hour. They have a pretty decent web presence and seem to be somewhat accurate. It doesn't hurt to check your site on more than one of these free sites to see all the links that are returned.

Aside from using backlink search tools, you can also check your incoming links manually.  To do this, you need to go to the major search engine pages for Google, Yahoo, and AltaVista and type Link:www.mydomain.com into the address bar. (type it exactly as shown, but insert the name of your website or blog after link:www)  This will return any links that are linking to your site.  Happy building!