SEO and Reporting: After The Work Is Done Or Is It? - Back Link Reporting
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Back links or links you have coming in to your site from external site is another fundamental metric to track in your SEO package. Back Links are important for two reasons, (1) the more links you have coming in to your site, the more traffic you have and (2) the more back links you have coming into your site, the more search engines consider your site important (i.e. PageRank).
Back links have obvious benefits, but how does one measure the number of backlinks' Below are the various search engines and syntaxes to determine back links.
Google: http://www.google.com/syntax: link:www.domainname.com
example: link:www.rustybrick.com
Google will bring back all the pages that link to your site with a PageRank of 4 out of 10 or above. Back links include links from internal pages that link to the URL entered after the link:. Other search engines show all the back links that are coming in to the URL.
AllTheWeb (FastSearch): http://www.alltheweb.com/syntax: link:www.domainname.com
example: link:www.rustybrick.com
AllTheWeb does an excellent job bringing back each and every page in its index that links to the URL you entered after the "link:". This is an excellent method of determining the number of links to your site.
AltaVista: http://www.altavista.com/syntax: link:www.domainname.com
example: link:www.rustybrick.com
AltaVista does an 'ok' job with this as well. AltaVista tends to filter out more a lot more of the results than AllTheWeb. Test both and see which one you like to report on.
For more syntaxes or search engines please go to SEO Chat and ask for them in the forum.
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