How to Find Out What Links a Website Has

So you are beginning a link building campaign or are a few months into building links for your website and want to know what links your site has and what links your competitors have so you can benchmark yourself against them.  What tools can you use to find this out and what can you do with this information?

As we’ve mentioned before the Google Link: command no longer works for reporting links so going to Google to use this tool is not ideal.  However Google Webmaster Tools do offer information about your inbound links and the anchor texts they use.  This is a good place to start as it enables you to see if there is a good split in the link anchor texts pointing to your site – it also enables you to see if your website has inbound links relevant to your products or services or totally irrelevant.

The link anchor texts of your inbound links are important to search engines as they show that the website linking to you thinks you are an authority on the subject.  Some time ago there was a lot of talk in the SEO industry about Adobe, who had a really high number of links to their website with the link anchor text “click here” which was caused by the Adobe Acrobat Reader tool they offer.  With so many people putting PDF files on their website it became really popular to link to the Adobe Download page for Acrobat Reader and these links were generally along the lines of “to get the Adobe Acrobat Reader Click here” with the words “click here” being the link anchor text.  Google then found thousands of these “click” here links around the internet and Adobe are still number one in Google for this term.  This link anchor text doesn’t really help Adobe as a business as they don’t offer a product called “click here”!  Now it is unlikely that you will have an issue on the scale of this from your inbound links but using Google Webmaster Tools to see the most common link anchor texts could help you avoid similar issues on your site.

Once you have checked the inbound link anchor text using Google Webmaster Tools you can move onto other link checking tools to ensure that your link building is going well or to check on the link building of another site.

Yahoo Site Explorer offers a simple links check – just go to Yahoo and use the Link: command (unlike Google, Yahoo still let people use this command).  Yahoo Site Explorer lets you see the links to both the homepage of your site and the sub pages on the site.

Backlink Watch is a good tool for seeing the total number of links and their individual anchor texts in a table format.  This is useful for seeing if most of links you have are missing an anchor text.

Majestic SEO offers some really detailed information about inbound links.  For your own site you can upload a verification file that enables you to see link information free of charge.  If you want to look at detailed information for your competitors you can buy reports for their sites from majestic.  A report that expires in 7 days costs from 50p to around £2.  You can download the information for your competitors in spreadsheet format so that you have the report information for longer.  The Majestic links checking service is great for finding out roughly how many links per month your competitors are building, the sorts of domains they have links from and the link anchor texts they are using.  Majestic SEO is the only tool that will show you 301s in the link information, useful if a site has been redirected recently.

Remember outbound links to authority sites can also help your website – if you want to know what external links you have on your site use our external link checker.

Link building is an important part of the SEO work you do on your website and using these tools can help you monitor and improve the work you are doing.

Emily Mace
Campaign Delivery Manager