Calum - 1:40 pm on May 15, 2004 (gmt 0)

Hello Silverbytes from an avid Arelis fan.

Lets start by clarifying what Arelis does.
If you have a site entered into your database, Arelis spiders their site. So if your link appears anywhere on their site, Arelis allows you to choose to change the status to "Site links back" and can also put the tick in the Links Back box.
So this takes care of people you've written to.

What this doesn't tell you is the quality of the link. So if they have stuck it onto a site that is more than 2 clicks from home or doesn't yet have a G PR or is cloacked - you won't know. So what do you do?
Go visit their site and search for your site (I use Ctrl-F and type in a unique word or part of a word on each suspecting page). When you find the page, copy it into the Arelis box that shows their link to you (one that says "optional") This allows you to quickly track their page down in the future if they ever stop linking to you. Arelis will tell you that they have stopped (just as before) - and this link will allow youto verify for sure that the page you were on still exists, to inform you as to what's happened before you write off to their webmaster.

As for finding links from people who you do not have in the database - I know not of any method other than going to Yahoo and typing in:
Link:http://www.mydomain.com
Although it's not bang up to date, it's much better than G. Both are not yet showing backlinks from the last 2 or so months. I do however see my site steadily bumping off other top sites on the SERP's for my targetted keywords on G. I've not changed anything else on the site, so I know the backlinks are kicking in despite not being shown by SE's.

As suggested earlier, if you really want to know who's secretly linking to you, then trawl through your visitor logs. There are some progs that list every single domain that's passed any traffic to you. Problem with this method is that many sites who don't link to you will show up here. So to suss them out get Arelis to spider them by entering their details into Arelis's database.

<snip>

[edited by: martinibuster at 4:24 pm (utc) on May 15, 2004]
[edit reason] Please, no self promotion. Thanks. [/edit]