seo backlinks: how to find links that are linking back your webpages

Building or acquiring back links are an important part of the Search Engine Optimization (SEO) process. So, What are BacklinksBacklinks are defined as URLs that points to a webpage on your domain from another webpage in a different domain. Although internal links (within the same domain)  can also be considered as backlinks, for the purpose of SEO mostly links from another domain is considered more important. Back-links are also sometimes referred to as the inward links or inbound links.

There are several good reasons as to why the backlinks are important in the success of your blog or website…

Popularity: The number of backlinks is a good measure of the general popularity of the website. The more backlinks that you have from various different domains, more popular your website or webpage is perceived to be.

Traffic: Your website receives traffic when people click on these inbound links that point to your webpages. The more backlinks you have on other domains, the more traffic you get (at least in theory). This obviously depends on the popularity of the website that has the backlink that is pointing to you.

SEO: Search engines use the quality of backlink as a measure in determining the search engine ranking for your webpage in search results. The web pages with good quality backlinks from domains with a good page rank often rank higher in the search results.

Backlink Quality and Relevance

As the backlinks are used to compute the relevance and quality of your website, the quality of the backlinks itself matter. As a general rule, the more backlinks you have the better but you do have to be careful in that you do not generate predominantly bad quality links. Having a large number of backlinks from a number of bad quality websites such as content farms and paid sites can negatively affect the ranking of your website.

Bad Backlinks

Remember that some percentage of bad links are unavoidable and to be expected. It is probably not worth the time and effort to have them removed. So, the most important thing to consider is that it is not an overwhelming percentage of your total links.

Finding Backlinks

Backlinks itself are fluid with many being added and many removed all the time. Sometimes the backlinks expire or are removed or moved by the time you find it. It could still exist in the search engine indexes till those web pages are crawled again. There is no single tool that will show you every single backlink that exists.

However, there are several tools that you can use in tandem to track down most of these backlinks. Many of them do a good job, but none of them does it accurately and completely…

Google Webmaster Tools

This tool provides quite a bit of information about your website including the backlinks in google index. This is probably one of the most comprehensive and the one I use the most. To see the backlinks: in the left hand side menu click on Search Traffic and then Links to Your Site. It provides you with several options to drill down find the exact page where the backlinks are present.

Another good feature is that they do differentiate between internal links and external links and that makes it easier for SEO.

Open Site Explorer

Another good site from SEOMoz which provides a wealth of information including the backlinks. Unfortunately  the good part of it behind a paywall and you have to go pro to access it. I have seen that it does show much less links that the google tools, but does indeed show all the important and good domains. Some of the obscure web domains that showed up on GWT were missing here.

SEO with Site Explorer

Google Search

Another method of looking for links is using the Google search engine. You can use the Google search operator links: to search for backlinks. This has never given me a complete set of links or anything close to what is shown in the Google Webmaster tools. This is a small sampling of the backlinks.

You can use the search query links:domain.com to find pages that link to your domain.

Website Logs

Another good source of backlink information comes from your own website logs. The website logs every hit that comes to your website. Depending on how your logs are configured, you might be able to find many interesting information about the hit. It gives you the IP address of the user. It will also show you something called the Referrer field, that might point you back to the domain that has a backlink.

In addition to the above mentioned applications, there are several more tools that are available such as AlexaMajestic SEO, SemRush, and Bing webmaster tools.

Finding and analyzing the backlinks helps you maintain the quality of the website, especially with the search engines. If you feel like your website is generating a large amount of bad backlinks that is hurting your search engine rankings then you can try to remove the bad backlinks, if possible. Google also allows you to mark these as bad links using the Disavow tool.