Who’s Linking to Your Site? Finding the Backlinks to Your Web Page

© 2011 by Aurelio Locsin.

You may have written the most useful and beautiful web page on the Internet. But it will remain unvisited unless people can find it. One way visitors locate your site is by following links to it from other sites. These links are called backlinks. The more backlinks that your page has, the more likely that people can find it and visit it. Your effort also moves up in the rankings for search engines like Google.

One way to get backlinks to your site is by manually posting them on other blogs, forums or web pages. This exposes your writing to a audiences that may not know of your site. If they find your information useful enough, they may post links to it without your knowledge. Your website provider may also automatically index your page. To find the backlinks to your website, do the following:

1. Browse the Google search engine.

Though other search engines are available, Google is by far the most popular. It is also the program that Adsense relies on to calculate the number of potential searches to your website.

2. Enter the web page address.

Remove the http:// part and precede the address with the word links: (with the letter s and a colon (:) at the end) as follows:

links: <web page name>
 

Where <web page name> is the URL of the page you want to check. The following is an example:

links:alocsin.hubpages.com/hub/ghest-Paid-Engineer-Jobs-in-the-USA

3. Click the Search button to display the results.

The number of links appears at the top of the list. This examples shows 308 backlinks. The actual pages that link to your site are listed as well.

4. Page through the listed links.

This gives you some idea of how others are links to your page. Click a link that you find interesting or unusual.

• If you think the site that is referring to your page inappropriate (such as from an adult or hate site), you can write the link owner and ask that your reference be removed.

• If the reference is appropriate, which is more likely, you can write the link owner to ask if she’ll include more links to your sites. You might want to set up a backlink exchange. You offer to put links to her pages on your site, in exchange for links to your pages on his site.

The number of backlinks to a page does not correlate exactly with the number of visitors. But, in general, sites with many backlinks get more visitors. Sites with little to no backlinks get little to no visitors.

Though you can use this technique on any of your web pages, you may want to reserve it for those that do not receive enough visitors. If a specific page already receives many readers, there's little need to increase its backlinks.

Check the backlinks for pages that you do not own but that are either similar to yours or belong to your closest competitors. Find out where those links are located, and put links to your sites on those pages.

For ideas on increasing backlinks or visitors, check out my following articles: