Where Can I Check My Backlinks?

Yahoo! Site Explorer has always been a quick and easy way to check the backlinks to your website or blog. As we learned back in July however, this publicly available stat checker will be retired by the end of this year. Speculation is that this tool will be moved within the walls of Bing Webmaster Tools in an attempt to overtake Google Webmaster Tools, which is what the majority of website owners currently use. Though not as quick, there is another way to check my backlinks when Yahoo! Site Explorer retires.

If you are not currently using Google Webmaster Tools, you should. There is a plethora of information about your sites in there, including backlink information.

In your dashboard, you will see a list of sites that you have connected. Click on the one you want to check.

You will now see several options you can dig further into. In this case, you want to check Links to Site. Click More.

In your Overview, you can see the total number of links that Google sees, who links to you the most, the keywords people are using to link to you, and which pages people are linking most often.

By clicking through More on Who Links Most, you can dig further. You can see how many times a specific domain has linked to you and how many individual pages they have linked. You can click through any of the pages linked to and see exactly where on that domain the backlink is located. This will give you an in-depth look of where your backlinks are and which pieces of content are the most popular. This is information you can capitalize on.

If you haven’t yet connected Webmaster Tools to the sites you manage, you will need to do that. The process is rather simple, especially if you already have Google Analytics installed on your site. In the dashboard you will simply click Add Site, enter the URL, Continue and click the alternate methods button for verifying for your site. This will give you a few options for automatically pulling code that may already be installed on your site without having to hop over to your site and add another code.

How do you check your backlinks?