Link Popularity Tools

[leef50]

I have been looking into link popularity tools and notice that some seem to show more backlinks that others. The one I used at widexl says I have 72 on altavista but when I search link:http://domain it shows only 3 links? What is the best way to check who is linking to me?

[Marcia]

Right at the search engines, leef50. Use Google and alltheweb.com

[Mohamed_E]

For Google the search:

link:my.site.com

will give you two pieces on information. It will give you a number that is allegedly the number of links to your site, and it will display half of them.

It is not clear what the undisplayed half consists of, there are times when I doubt that it exists! Currently Google claims to have 212 links pointing to my index page, and displays 106 of them. These include about 70 internal links and 35 external ones, implying that there are an additional 106 external links that do not show up.

There are a very few really valuable links that do not show up, but they can account at most for about 10 of the 106 missing links. Some of these are certainly DMOZ clones (some of which show up in alltheweb), but I very much doubt that they add up to anything like the alleged total.

I assume that the reported total bears some relation to the truth, so if it goes up from one month to the next that means that I have more links. On the other hand I have no faith in the actual numeric value.