question of a newbie - Checking Backlinks

[seppeke]

how can i see howmany backlinks i have? I instaled seo toolbar, but i mus have much more links than it shows
Just the links i have on y site are already much more than it says on the seo toolbar

[goodroi]

Each search engine measures backlinks differently. Also search engines do not always give credit for every single backlink you have pointing to your site. This could be because the linking page is poor quality or has yet to be re-crawled by the search engine.

To find out how many backlinks the search engines think your website has you need to perform a backlink search with each search engine. Google shares this information only with site owners when they log into Google's Webmaster Central. For Yahoo you can use Yahoo's Site Explorer.

[FranticFish]

There are also a few link dbs out there that show more links than Yahoo will - and the biggest is free to use on your site.

[Alexei]

Try Yahoo Site Explorer or Open Site Explorer.

[penders]

To find out how many backlinks the search engines think your website has you need to perform a backlink search with each search engine. Google shares this information only with site owners when they log into Google's Webmaster Central.

I always thought google provided the publicly available link: instruction/prefix for this task. eg. link:www.example.com/index.html is supposed to return all the pages that link to this page. However, it never provides much in the way of results in my experience?! When Google's Webmaster Tools certainly does.

I suppose successful backlinks should appear in your referrer log?

[meelosh]

yahoo site explorer works best for me

[FranticFish]

Yahoo SiteExplorer is limited to 1000 results. A few site-wide links make it not much more than a sample. It's not organised in any way.

There are two types of tools:

- those that use Yahoo data and organise it in some way (there are loads of these)
- those that have their own spiders and gather their own data (there are a few of these)

The second type are the best IMO. They show far more data and allow you to filter it too. The biggest I've come across (so far) is also free to use on your own site.