Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
How can I verify who links to me?
-
I need to verify all the inbound links I have coming in to my site. I've tried using OSE but have been told it does not scrape many smaller sites so cannot be sure of it's accuracy (especially since when I ran it, it returned a small % of the link i know are out there).
Is there a way to do this in Analytics? Or another way?
Thanks
-
There has to be a way to see all links pointing to your site...
Actually, there is not.
Any tool which provides a report of links to your site has to collect the data somehow. The most common means is to crawl the internet, collecting data on each page that is encountered. There are very few organizations which have sufficient resources to crawl billions of web pages and process the data in a timely manner. Google is by far the most efficient.
Even so, web pages can be blocked by various methods:
-
the page could be on a member-only part of the site which requires a username and password to view. Such a page cannot be discovered by crawlers.
-
the page could be tagged with noindex, nofollow to where the link is not discovered. It can also be blocked with robots.txt
-
the link may be presented in an iframe, flash or other means which the crawler does not capture.
-
the page may be buried so deeply on a site, or on an island page, where the crawler does not ever reach it.
In the above cases, a link to your site may exist but not be found. An excellent means to capture undiscovered links is using Google Analytics to determine the source of any traffic. This method can help you discover links to your site which otherwise were not discovered via a crawler.
If a link does exist but is not captured by OSE and is not sending you any traffic, the link likely has no value at all.
-
-
Looking for a complete list. There has to be a way to see all links pointing to your site...
-
in analytics you can actually see the links that send you visitors. You can have a look at them under traffic sources and linking sites. However this is not a complete set of sites linking to you.
-
And how do I do this in Analytics?
-
Open site expolorer here by seomoz, or you can try open site explorer by yahoo. Here you can find a list of some more if you would like to try multiple ones: http://www.toprankblog.com/2009/11/1-seo-tools-for-tracking-inbound-links/
-
Other than Open site Explorer, Google analytic would be your best bet.
Good luck friend
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Can affiliate links benefit or hurt my seo?
I have just signed up with a company to do affiliate marketing for my site. I am now in the process of reaching out to publishers and seeing who will publish my link on their site. Is there any benefit in terms of seo for having these links, and can there be any potential downside to these links as well?
Link Building | Jun 21, 2018, 5:12 AM | whiteonlySEO0 -
What tool can be used to provide a list of links on a website that points to other websites?
For example: On a website there are items in the news listing that point to articles about a company that appear on online news sites; items that point to collateral hosted by vendors we use, etc. What tool can be used to provide a list of these links?
Link Building | Mar 26, 2014, 7:31 AM | Scratch_MM0 -
How can I find and fix my broken links
There are a number(110) links that SEOmoz has found to have 404 errors. I have been able to find and fix many of them but there are links that are coming from our home page that do not seem to exist. I cannot even find the links in our system in wordpress. Is there something obvious that I am missing? Is there a way to locate where the links are originating from?
Link Building | Mar 23, 2013, 9:30 PM | careerealism0 -
A link with "return false"- OSE sees as a No Followed Link
Hello, I couldn't find a clear answer to the impact on SEO for a link written in this way: [" class="expert_info" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;">](w</span>ww.yourwebsite.com<span style=) [Does the "return false" act as a "no follow"? I came across this in our link data in Open Site Explorer which lists these links all as "no follows." However, an engineer I spoke to said that it shouldn't impact search engine behavior. Any ideas? Thank you in advance! -Sarah K.](w</span>ww.yourwebsite.com<span style=)
Link Building | Feb 27, 2013, 2:30 AM | OneMedical0 -
I remember hearing in one of the link building webinars that if you hold a patent then you could get a link from that somehow.
Any examples or suggestions as to how this is done?
Link Building | Apr 26, 2012, 4:06 AM | larahill1 -
Can indirect linking be valuable?
I have a client who is using a SEO company (Hubshout, delete name if necessary) to boost traffic to their website. They are doing this by publishing articles and submitting them to article directories, then they use their own sites/blogs (which are valueless, PR and MozRank of zero) to point to these articles and they say that this helps boost there rankings. How? They are not linking to the clients websites, creating artificial links from their own websites to article directories instead of the clients website. Are they trying to boost the value of the article or trying to boost their own websites? How does this help out the client? It is similar to three way linking but is not.
Link Building | Jul 13, 2011, 12:18 AM | Michael_Rock0 -
Does linking to a subdomain give link juice to the main domain?
I have a few domains that I'm going to use for link building, will the link juice from the sub domains transfer to the main domain?
Link Building | Jun 20, 2011, 1:21 PM | Vsky0 -
Link Frequency
I understand that good link building is all about the quality of the link / the anchor text attached to it. But, what about frequency? Should I build until I can't build anymore? or create a plan to submit links to a certain # of sites per week/month?
Link Building | Nov 13, 2011, 3:25 PM | pricefutures0