How Many Links Do I Have?

By Promoting Webs

Having links coming to your website from other websites (backlinks) are extremely important in getting top rankings today. Search engines such as Google are now placing high importance on links and other “off page factors” in assigning top rankings. Think of this as a popularity contest. If your web site is important enough for other web sites to link to, then you must have an important web site and therefore the search engines elevate your website ranking.

Search engines want to see a steady sustained growth in the number of links that website is receiving. Too fast of link growth looks artificial and can hurt a website’s rankings.

Measuring the Number of Links

But how do you measure how many links you have? There are two common ways.

1. You can go each individual search engine and query it as to how many links exist
2. You can use software that will measure and report how many links exist.

Query the Search Engines

To query each search engine, go to the individual search engine and type in, in the search bar, the following:

Search Engine At Search Engine, Enter in Search Bar

A9 link:www.YOURDOMAIN.COM
Alltheweb link:www.YOURDOMAIN.COM
AltaVista linkdomain:www.YOURDOMAIN.COM
Ask WWW.YOURDOMAIN.COM DIV

site:-www.YOURDOMAIN.COM
Hotbot link:www.YOURDOMAIN.COM
Google link:www.YOURDOMAIN.COM
MSN link:www.YOURDOMAIN.COM -

domain:www.YOURDOMAIN.COM
Yahoo.com link:http://www.YOURDOMAIN.COM

Using a Software Program

There are a number of software solutions available. Our favorite is LinkPopularityCheck 3.0.1. This is a freeware program that will measure the number of links for your website(s) across all of the major engines. It is simple and easy to use. It is available at: www.checkyourlinkpopularity.com.

Deciphering the Results

Many times the number of links reported will be a very large number and will include internal links within your website and some duplicate links. We decided to measure and see how many of these links we could validate. We took one of our websites where Yahoo reported 12,000 links. We built a program to take the first 1000 of these links and go out and check for a presence of a link back to the website. What we found, once we removed the internal link, is that we could confirm only about 20% of these links. This means that the links reported by the search engines include many more reported links than you may have set up with link exchanges or actual references to your web site. Many of these may be obsolete or deleted links that may disappear with the search engine’s next refresh.

What does all of this data mean?

In summary, the spiders used in the link reporting software under reports the number of links to your website (fewer than really exist). The search engines over report the number of links to your website (more than really exist). The reality lies somewhere in between.

Key to Link Popularity

The key to any link popularity campaign is a continual slow and sustained growth of links. It needs to be a natural growth and can be monitored with either link popularity software or by directly querying the search engines.

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