You undoubtedly know by now that quality links to your site are important. But do you know how to find out how many backlinks to your web site are out there?
Backlink checkers are nifty tools. I tried three that were recommended on a Squidoo lens about this subject. Interestingly the results were quite different from one to the next.
A check of this blog using Domain Inbound Links Checker from online-utility.org showed that at this moment I have 100 backlinks from 10 different .com domains. Most of these were blog-related. None of the search engines showed up in the list.
Search Engine Genie BackLink Checker Tool results looked quite different: 158 backlinks in Yahoo, 134 in MSN, 172 in AltaVista, and 168 in AllTheWeb. They have a separate Google BackLink Checker over there as well.
Backlink Checker results were really different. All that showed up were AltaVista and AllTheWeb results. For what it’s worth they were identical to the Search Engine Genie numbers.
I decided to do a Google search for backlink checkers and tried several from the first page results. One of these, backlinkwatch.com, told me ”Your website has not backlinks to report. ” Obviously not true, and bad English to boot! Another, at iwebtool.com, asked me to try later because it was “unable to retrieve backlinks at this time.” Unfortunately, several tries over the course of 8-9 hours gave the same results.
Domain-Pop.com’s backlink checker showed 159 backlinks from 12 domains which seems in line with the first three sites I used. But it showed zero for Yahoo, 33 for Google, and a strange message about MSN, “MSN cancelled this service.” Ok.
I don’t know enough about the programming side of things to understand why the results differ (feel free to comment if you do!), but I do know that good backlinks are important, so I’ll be using a combination of these to check my sites every once in a while to see how I’m doing.
Sallie
Tags: backlinks, Free Tools
Really, most backlinks checkers don’t give accurate results, some are satisfactory while some are gross. Anyway, I too been looking for a better backlink checker, hope I’ll find it soon.
My favorite tool is Yahoo! Site Explorer. Check it here – http://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/
You will never be able to see a 100% accurate count of backlinks.
I am not sure why this happens.I always have more links in altavista and yahoo than Google.Can anyone explain why?
I wish I knew the answer. It probably has to do with the algorithms each of them uses. If I find out more I’ll write about it — and if anyone reading this knows, please share!