Google Tip: How-to know who’s linking to your website
I have often wondered if there was an easy way to know who’s linking my webpages to theirs. I know a lot of “other things” to do this like through your webhits logs or even your weekly Google Analytics report. That takes a series of steps, logons and a few analysis too. But what if you’d just want to know QUICKLY, as in now, who’s been linking to you?
Here’s how, and I’d use one of my webpages www.theedgeradio.net as an example.
Step 1: Go to www.google.com
Step 2: Put “link:www.theedgeradio.net” inside the search box
Step 3: Hit search!
Yes, that’s it… just three steps and you have at least the quick and easy data in front of you. You could see I only have 58 links to my page. 
Could you link yours to mine! haha!
Anyway, this is one quick method to know how you’ve been faring with your websites target audience. Is your online campaign & presence worthy enough for a link back?
Ran this same method against some of the popular community sites and here’s what I got:
1. Facebook.com – 25,600 link backs
2. Friendster.com – 2,760 link backs
3. hi5.com – 1,940 link backs
4. cnn.com – 33,000 link backs
5. googletutor.com – 451
Interesting isn’t it?
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Looks like a great idea but it doesn’t work for me. I tried two of your examples after getting no results for my site. Is there something missing from the steps or ???
This is useful, but it has limitations. Mainly due to the way that Google looks at links. Using the link: method at Google I have 215 links to http://www.philb.com but with Yahoo that figure climbs to over 4,000 links to my home page and over 20,000 to my site as a whole.
Consequently while it’s interesting, it’s not really an accurate reflection of who is linking to a particular site.
agreed Phil. Peter doesn’t know as much about checking links, Y! SiteExplorer is the best tool for this https://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com
Yahoo is definitely the best for viewing links, Google and MSN both are known for giving users only partial results. Here is how to check your links in Yahoo:
1. Go to Yahoo (this example doesn’t require Y!SE)
2. Type the following into the search bar:
linkdomain:www.YourSite.com -site:www.YourSite.com
3. You should be left with external sites that have links to yours
Tip: Use the above operator but leave out “www.” it will often yield some new results that the other misses.