TweetSo — you understand why links are important to your website — now you want to find out how many links you have and from who.
Easy — pop over to Yahoo! and type in the following
You need to replace the yoursite.com with your own website and then click “Web Search”
This will open up Yahoo Site Explorer — you will see two tabs in the upper left hand corner, “Pages” and “Inlinks”
The “Pages” shows you the number of and lists the pages that are in the Yahoo index. The “Inlinks” tab shows you the number of and lists the inbound links that are coming to your site.
When checking website links using Yahoo site explorer there are a few things to know:
- These links are not necessarily in any order — although they tend to be strongest first.
- You can change the settings (shown in the red box above) to change the query — leave me a comment below if you have questions about these settings.
- Some of these links will be “no follows” — no followed links are links that have the rel= “no follow” attribute and don’t pass any “link juice.” In other words, they don’t have the same SEO benefit (if any at all) that a “do follow” link has. Again, leave me a comment below if you have questions about “no follow” and “do follow” links.
I would recommend that you use Yahoo to check website links for yourself and your competitors. Find the “low hanging fruit” links that your competitors have that you could easily get as well.
What about you? What kinds of questions do you have about how to check website links in Yahoo?
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{ 4 comments… read them below or add one }
Hi Russ,
Thank you for the descriptive information. I love the metaphors.
I always learn from your posts. Please, for those of us just learning to speak web-lingo, elaborate on “low hanging fruit” and “link juice.”
All the best, ruby
@ruby wilhite — First a bit of background… Google will reward you with better rankings if they see that other websites are linking to you. Each time someone links to one of your pages, Google will consider this a “vote” for the content on that website.
You can read more about the importance of links here.
If the idea is to secure more links, finding the easy or “low hanging” links that your competitors have secured and then attempting to secure them for your own website is a good strategy. For example, if you see that one of your competitors has secured a link from a “yellow pages” like directory that you can easily submit to —- this is an easy “low hanging” link that you can get for your own website.
“Link juice” is a euphemism for the power or authority that one site passes to another by linking to them. Powerful, aged and authoritative websites pass more “link juice” than weak, brand spanking new and unproven websites.
What other questions do you have about links?
Russ:
Another tiny, but mighty tip from you!
I had no idea about the links. When I check mine – YIKES!
I’ll need to work on this.
Thanks, again, for the tiny, mighty tip!
Fred
@Fred E. Miller — Remember to check your competitors links as well! There are probably a few easy links you could get for your site that will be discovered from every linkdomain: done on a competing website.