Who's Linking to Your Site?

If you have your website verified with Google, there's a cool new tool, the Links tab (see below), in Google Webmaster Tools where you can now check who is linking to you.


Although a major improvement, the only drawback is that it may show the full blog roll of a blog linking to your web site! There may be occasions when in-coming links don't show up, such as when a site linking to yours is not being crawled by or in the Google index.

Another way of checking who is linking to any web site, not just your own, is to use the "link:" command query by typing link:www.mywebsite.com into the search box for Google, Yahoo and MSN search engines, e.g:


This does not work properly in Google. I have heard it said that it is "broken" or "disabled" on purpose (i.e. for their own reasons Google may not want it to work properly). In Google, the the "link:" command only returns a selection of sites, if any, linking to the web site queried. The results will also vary, so this is totally unreliable. You will find hundreds of posts asking about this in the Google webmaster forums!

So, if you want to query the links to a website using the "link:" command, it is better to use both Yahoo and MSN . (Please note: UK versions of Yahoo and MSN given). Remember, if a site linking to yours is not in the search engine queried, it may not show up as a link.

See Checking the Search Engine Index for checking the indexed pages of a website using the "site:" command.