I post at SearchCommander.com now, and this post was published 18 years 3 months 9 days ago. This industry changes FAST, so blindly following the advice here *may not* be a good idea! If you're at all unsure, feel free to hit me up on Twitter and ask.
Google’s finally done another backlink update over the weekend, and as of Saturday, yourinbound link numbers should show a healthy increase.
Go to Google and search for “site:yourdomain.com” (without the quotes) and you will not get a list of every webpage that links to you, but you will get every page that Google is counting, and that’s what really matters.
If your number of inbound links isn’t on the rise, you need to get busy, pronto. How can you build your inbound links?
If you get creative with your content, then good inbound links will start coming your way eventually. It’s just a matter of time, but can you afford to wait it out?
Once you have a linkworthy site, you should seek out good potential linking websites, and send them an introductory email pointing out your site. Explaining how it can bring value to their visitors, and why they should link to you.
Then you politely bug the webmaster incessantly until you actually get them to link to your site, or they tell you to go away. You might even follow up with a phone call!
Who has the time for that? I certainly don’t, and neither do most business owners. It’s gruelling, frustrating, and time consuming work, but I’ve found some people that are pretty good at it.
Each week, you’re provided with a spread sheet of the developed links to verify, and that’s all there is to it. It’s a great way to get links without doing all the hard work yourself.
If you already have a decent website, then you should consider buying permanent one way inbound links to jumpstart your business.
Scott,
Is there a way to run this Google search to exclude the non “yourdomain.com” links?
The similar tool on Yahoo has that feature — I did not readily see that feature with Google.
Thanks!
Well, there’s no quick hack I know of, but if you have a Google site map, then of course you can log in and and see ALL external links that Google knows about.
Remember the number Google shows is so low compared to Yahoo, that is usually not hard to filter out your own URLs, especially since most are indented.
It’s also important to note that this low number Google reports to the public is of questionable value.
Personally, right now I’m skeptical that the number of links Google shows the public is of any value at all.
It’s generally believed that they are not showing all of the links that they are really “counting” and they are really not “counting” all of the links that they are showing in that public link: search anyway.
Here are two posts that might interest you:
Google’s link tab inside Webmaster tools
https://www.pdxtc.com/wpblog/archives/335
Determining the value of a link
https://www.pdxtc.com/wpblog/archives/408