Today I want to show you how to find out how many websites are linking to according to Yahoo and Google. And then I’ll show you a couple problems with this count.
Google link counts
To find out how many websites are linking to you according to Google just go to google.com and search for:
link:your_site.com
Example:
link:nickstraffictricks.com
Make sure there is no space between your link: and your website. This was a mistake I made when I first published this post. Luckily one of my readers caught it and let me know.
From this we can see that my website has 3 incoming links. This number is only a small fraction of the actual number Google knows about.
Note that your results may vary depending on if you use the www or not.
Yahoo link counts
To find out how many sites are linking to you according to Yahoo go to:
https://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/
Put your site’s URL in the top field and click on “Explore URL”.
From this we can see that my website has 962 incoming links.
Note that your results may vary depending on if you use the www or not.
These are not the real link counts
Frequently people will see large differences in the link counts from Google or Yahoo from day-to-day. This is because they only show a portion or sample of the links they’ve actually counted.
They’re not showing the true number. And I don’t know if anyone outside of Yahoo or Google has access to the real counts.
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When I run a search on Google, it shows that my website has 779 incoming links. Now, some of the links are not even in a far-fetched way related to my website. It's just that they have the words Smith Kennedy in them. Do these links keep changing if I use yahoo India and Yahoo Uk or any other country specific domain?
Anyways, thanks for the information Nick. Much appreciated.
Whitney Accountant,
Nick can correct me on this, but I'm pretty sure the query is supposed to be link:yoursite.com, NOT link: yoursite.com (no space). If you have a space, then google treats it like a regular search, which is why you got the results you did.
The Google "link:" function is very limited and returns a ridiculously small subset of links. I don't even think it's worth using. A much better place to see Google links is in Webmaster Tools. Yahoo Site Explorer is good, but it tells you how many links Yahoo knows about, not Google. And of course, as Nick said, it will ALWAYS be lower than the actual amount.
link:nickstraffictricks.com = 3 results
kitchen trash can is exactly right. This is a mistake that I made and have since fixed in my post.
Thank you kitchen trash can!
Nick, aren't you unhappy that Google is showing only 3 links to your website as opposed to Yahoo Explorer's 962 links. What I mean to ask is why Google shows such a low score? I bet you have tons of links which Google doesn't show in the sample. For link:smithkennedy.co.uk, the score is 4.
Google and Yahoo have different crawlers and have a different number of links internally. It seems that Google likes to show a very small sample of the number of links I have.
Does it make me unhappy? I guess it does but I really have no control over it. So I don't worry about it. Instead I focus on building good content, answering questions, and building a community.
Eventually I would like to get to the point where I don't care about my ranking in any search engine. Instead my traffic will come from return visitors and social media.
Thanks Kitchen trash can. I will check use the webmaster tools right now. Did not know about it. Thanks
I remember there were other tricks aswell.
Search for links to a competing site minus the links which allready link to you aswell.
And also making a Google Alert of it.
Good ideas.
But sadly, I've forgotten how they did work,
but they do exist.
I'd be really interested in those. I'm knocking up some Python scripts to do something similar, but there has to be an easier way.
Handy tip Nick – Thank You.
For one of my sites I had 9 links from Google and 432 from Yahoo.
Any ideas why they would be so different?
Google and Yahoo are separate search engines and have different crawlers. They know about different back links to your website and so the counts are different. Furthermore, the each show a small sample of the links they know about. So it's no surprise that the count you get from each search engine is different.
Good job nick i like this trick, webmaster tools is a great way for most noobs that dont use it.
Thanks.
Has anyone figured out the difference between "link:" and "links:"? I get different results with these and am not sure why!
links: is not a valid search for how many people are linking to you. Instead it looks for references for your domain and the word links. So it what is returned will be very different from the number of links you have.
Google is very strict in reading backlinks now compared to yahoo.
When i try to figure out the links on google it says
Your search – link:smithkennedy.co.uk – did not match any documents.
Suggestions:
* Make sure all words are spelled correctly.
* Try different keywords.
* Try more general keywords.
It used to work only a few months ago. What do you think is going wrong?
Try going in through the webmaster tools with Google and you should be to see a lot more links pointing to your website.
Cool. i wouldn't have figured it out, if it wasn't for you Nick. cheers!
Ya nick you can see it on webmaster tools, and on other great websites, personaly i dont care about links, i care about rank in google. I can have 10 good links and outrank a site with 100 crap links.
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When you pick a niche that has low competition then it's not very hard to rank high.
If you want to see how many sites, other than your own, are linking to you, Google "link:" function is not worth bothering with as it will only show you a fraction of the actual number of sites linking to you.
Assuming that when someone wants to know how many sites are linking to their site, they mean sites other than their own site. In this case, Yahoo site explorer is also not reliable as it counts links on internal pages on your own site linking to other internal pages within your own site as well as other sites linking to you.
Hi all,
I don't know the exact formula, but google determines pagerank by the inbound links to a page and then minuses some amount for outbound links (if I'm wrong on this please set me straight).
So, here is my question. On my website, I use the FULL URL for all my links. Does google count those as outbound links which hurt my pagerank? What about the short version? Is that counted as an outbound link?
Thanks,
John
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To be honest I don't think it makes any difference.
Why google shows just only few links and yahoo hundreds?
I don't know the reason why but it's been like that for a long time.
Hey my blog shows up 0 links in google..while hundreds in yahoo. What is the basis google considers for counting these links?
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Internally Google will count a lot of links to your website but they don't report the correct number when you do a search. I have heard that you can get a better number for your particular website when you sign-up for Google Webmaster tools.
I never consider Yahoo because they don’t return accurate data in terms of links.
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