Discovering inbound links

via Google, AV, and Lycos - others?

[rjohara]

Greetings, all. If you want to discover other sites that have linked to yours "naturally" (i.e., not by some agreement you made), what tools exist to find those inbound links? I have used the links-to search features of Google, Altavista, and Lycos (which *definitely* needs a usability expert to redesign it). I assume these are the big ones; are there any other tools one can use to discover inbound links?

Many thanks.

[Brett_Tabke]

I don't garantee the long term viability of the utility, but it's back:
[searchengineworld.com...]

It is a difficult utility to keep updated, and search engines are not fond of them. So...pot luck.

[rjohara]

Many thanks for the pointer to what looks like a valuable service. Alas, it didn't seem to be working when I tried it, but it did let me find the link-to search on hotbot, which I hadn't seen before. (I was also offered the opportunity to buy the domain "anzwers.com" which seems to be dead. Only $40,000 - such a deal!) :-)

[Brett_Tabke]

I was probably updating it at the very time you tried it. That one takes weekly, sometimes daily care to keep tuned.

[bhartzer]

It's working fine now; nice tool!

[rjohara]

I must be doing something wrong or have a configuration that isn't supported (NS4 on a Mac). I enter my domain on the form, click the button, and all that that I can get to come up is a blank screen (nav bar and banner at the top, and nothing else).

(Or maybe its just telling me nobody links to me!)

[JamesR]

I used to watch my access logs dilligently and trace back to sites where clicks had come from. I haven't been worrying about it as much lately, focusing on other things.

[billy fullerton]

rjohara,

This might be of some use to you if you use it as well as the searchengineworld.com application. It lists other search engines and as far as I can tell it's every bit as good / bad as the others. I don't think any of the popularity services are spot on but with a bit of cross referencing you will get a general idea free and fast.

[ineedhits.com...]

[ggrot]

You might also go into the DMOZ directory. There is a group of sites in there lumped under something like "uses the DMOZ directory data". These sites mirror DMOZ in some way or another, usually through some script. Go through and submit the dynamic urls to google from these sites where your site would be listed. I just tried this since the last update, so I don't know if it will work, but for a little over an hour(i only went for the high PR directories), I figure I have nothing to lose.

[bird]

(Or maybe its just telling me nobody links to me!)

No, it's just refusing to produce correct HTML. ;)
If you see a mostly empty page in Netscape, then in 99% of the cases, there is a </table> tag missing somewhere in the code.