Understanding backlinks… What is link popularity?, Why is Important?
Link popularity is the term used in SEO (Search Engine Optimization) to describe the popularity of your site on the Internet, the more links your site has from other sites, the most popular is considered by search engines. This concept, first introduced by Google revolutionized the way websites are ranking on the web, this discovery was a huge success from Google which algorithm became so popular and precise than in a matter of years became the most popular search engine and one of the biggest companies in the world. Link popularity is often associated with PageRank which is a rating scale from Google where they qualify sites from 1 to 10 based on the probabilities of your site being found, off course Link Popularity is a big component of it, but not the only one.
Right now the content in your page and the link popularity are considered the main two factors search engines considered when they decide to place your site on top of the results, that’s why besides of having a great website it is important that you also have a pretty good amount of qualified backlinks to your site; content come first and I assure you backlinks will come after.
I already have a website, how do I check if other pages are linking back to me?
If you want to determine how many backlinks you page has, you can do so directly on the search engines, it is actually a simple process but is different depending the search engine you are using. I’ll concentrate in Google, Yahoo and Bing for being the most popular but virtually every search engine has similar tools.
How do I check backlinks in Google?
If you want to check your backlinks on Google all you have to do is go to www.google.com and on the search field put: link:yourcompany.com it is not necessary to use www or http:// just make sure you don’t live any spaces after the “:” and the URL of your site.
How do I check backlinks in Bing?
If you want to check your backlinks in Bing all you have to do is go to www.bing.com and on the search fields put: inbody:yourcompany.com you can use www or http:// when you make your search, but keep in mind that all of them could give you very different results; yahoo consider links independent if they differ on the prefix “www’ or “http://”, the results are based on an “exact match” criteria, Google doesn’t have that problem and they assume that even if the prefix change the link points to the same website; you can also leave a blank space after “:” and the results won’t be affected, something that for Google is a problem.
How do I check backlinks in Yahoo?
Yahoo Site Explorer
If you want to check your backlins in Yahoo all you have to do is go to http://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com and on the field “explore url” put your url, once you get the results make sure you click on the “inlinks” button and not on the “pages” button, you can use www or http:// when you make your search, but keep in mind that all of them could give you very different results; yahoo consider links independent if they differ on the prefix “www’ or “http://”, the results are based on an “exact match” criteria, Google doesn’t have that problem and they assume that even if the prefix change the link points to the same website.
Now that you did your homework you may find weird results… for instance you may say that on the backlinks results you can see links from your own website… well this problem have several explanations which I’ll try to describe next.
Backlinks misinterpreted.
Why when I check backlinks on Google, Yahoo or Bing I see results from my own domain?
This could be due to several factors, the most common one is that when you or someone in your behalf created your website they used “absolute” and not “relative” links to build it. Absolute links are links that use a complete url on the address, absolute links always include the prefix “http://” so search engines interpreted this is as an external link even tough in reality is an internal link. The other possible explanation is that even though the link is pointing to a page on the same domain could be on a subdomain or could be part of a different database if you are using some king of CMS application. If that’s the case the only way to link from one part of the page to another is to use “absolute” links. The links that Google, Bing or Yahoo don’t considered external are the ones using “relative” links, those links never used prefix such as ‘http://” or “www” they just point to another directory within your own domain and always start with the name of the subdirectory or just the name of the file if it is on the same root.
Ghost Backlinks
Google, Bing and Yahoo list some pages that supposedly have referral links to my page, when I go to those pages to check where the link is coming I can’t find anything.
This problem has also several explanations, first at all the link could be on an image not on a text, so please make sure you revise all the images as well by rollover the with the mouse and review on the status bar at the bottom of your browser where the link of the image is pointing to. The second problem is that the link existed there for sometime but it is not there anymore, this could happened if for instance you are running an online campaign on an Ad Network; whenever your ad shows up this link is registered as a backlink for search engines even if it is not permanent; usually these ads rotate with other advertisers’ ads so if it happened that you went there to check the backlink where another ad was running you would probably missed it.
Beyond the basics of Backlinks
Now that you know how to check the backlinks to your page and how to interpret them, let’s move a little bit beyond that.
What is you want to check the backlinks of Google, Yahoo and Bing all at the same time?
Submit Express - Back Link Checker
Well, if you want to do that, there are some tools that can help you with the task, no need to go search engine by search engine and doing that manually. All you have to do is go to http://www.submitexpress.com/linkpop/ and put the url you want to check. The nice thing of this tool is that compares side to side the backlinks from Google, Bing, Yahoo, Alltheweb and Altavista and also display information about the link popularity of other popular sites so you can get an idea where you are in terms of link popularity on the online world. You can click on the results below each search engine and you will be taken to the search engine itself populated with the results, I have to clarify that this feature doesn’t work so well, in Bing and Yahoo it will show you the results of a regular search, but at lease you will get an idea in terms of quantity.
Backlink Watch
If you want to get more detailed information of from where your backlinks are coming I recommend going directly to the search engines as I explained previously or use tools similar to this one http://www.backlinkwatch.com which gives you a pretty decent list of sites pointing to you including the “anchor’ text being used by the link. The other nice information this tool gives you is the OBL (Outbound Links), which means total external links found on backlink giving webpage; keep in mind that if a site linking to you has so many outbound links to other pages it may look more than a link farm than a reputable website, in those cases those cases the links are less valuable and surely not desirable.
On coming blogs I’ll be discussing
- What is the anchor text of a backlink and why is important?
- Why is important the PageRank of websites linking to you?
- How to properly build my link popularity, avoid websites with High OBL and low PageRank.
- Advance tools to check backlinks
This article has been written by Libardo Lambrano, founder of Syndikomm; an online marketing firm based in New York city and specialized in multicultural markets. Libardo Lambrano, a digital citizen of the world can be reached@llambrano