Link ExchangeWebmasters, Blogger, Authors are usually excited about knowing how there content is being is getting feedback over the Internet. Most popular way to do so is to track in-links to their site from the web. There are a bunch of sites which offer the same, but what better than a search engine. Scanning search engine’s index is one effective way of tracking back links. We have reviewed the top search engine methods on how to detect back-links to a site. Here are some of the queries we have tested over a while:

Using Google Web Search:

Google provides a search filter known as “link”. It is basically designed to show the sites in google index that link to your site. A example link query is shown below:

Query: link:www.lifebaker.com

Sample Link: http://www.google.com/search?q=link:www.lifebaker.com

You can even create a Google Alert so that you get informed every time a new update is added to Google’s index.

But this method yields very few results, so I gave other queries a try and found the following one to work quite good for detecting latest in-links to your blog. It shows the latest links being indexed by Google which have back-links to your site.

Query: http://lifebaker.com/* -site:lifebaker.com

Sample Link: http://www.google.co.in/search?q=http://www.lifebaker.com/*%20-site:lifebaker.com&tbs=rltm:1

Using Google Blog Search:

This is a very common method in use by many blogger but its accuracy has reduced over time. The in-links you find in WordPress panel are also found using Blog Search RSS feed.

Query: link:http://lifebaker.com

Sample Link: http://blogsearch.google.com/blogsearch?q=link:http://lifebaker.com

Feed Link: http://blogsearch.google.com/blogsearch_feeds?q=link:http://lifebaker.com&ie=utf-8&num=10&output=rss

Using Yahoo:

Yahoo’s Site Explorer is another goog method for tracking in-links to your blog.

Query: link:http://lifebaker.com

Sample Link: http://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/search?p=http://www.lifebaker.com&bwm=i

Using Bing:

We can use the same query as we used above for Google to search inlinks using Bing. Bing even provides a rss feed for your queries if you add &format=rss at the end of the query.

Query: http://lifebaker.com/* -site:lifebaker.com

Sample Link: http://www.bing.com/search?q=http://www.lifebaker.com/*+-site:lifebaker.com

Feed Link – http://www.bing.com/search?q=http://www.lifebaker.com/*+-site:lifebaker.com&format=rss

Using Technorati:

Technorati is one of the oldest service to provide in-links but its accuracy has decreased over time. You can find in-links to your blog from other blogs indexed by Technorati.

Conclusion:

There are a bunch of more services which offer the same. But mainly I prefer using Google Blog Search, Google Latest Web Search and Bing to track the links. Note: LifeBaker is a new blog. We have limited posts as of now, thus above link might not yield much results. Try it on some popular blogs and you will be able to note the difference. Image via Flickr.