How To Check Your Backlinks On Yahoo!

If you’ve been out there building links to your website for some time now, you may be wondering how many of your links have actually been picked up by the search engines. There are several different things you can do to find out how many backlinks have been picked up by a search engine, but today we’re going to focus on an effective way to check how many backlinks Yahoo! says that you have.

Before we get started, you need to keep in mind that you may have built more links than Yahoo! shows you. That’s the nature of the way search engines work. Your links aren’t picked up the same moment they are created, they have to be found first. Also, these will only be the links picked up by Yahoo!, Google and the other search engines probably have a different number as well.

So let’s get started on how to check your backlinks with Yahoo!.

First, go to Yahoo.com and in the search bar you need to type in site:www.yourdomainname.com, replacing the sample domain name with your own of course. Then hit enter or click on “Web Search”. This will take you to a page in Yahoo! called the Yahoo! Search Site Explorer.

If you go down the left hand side of the page just a little bit, you’ll see where it says “Results”. Right below that it says “Pages (number) | Inlinks (number)”. “Pages” tells you how many pages Yahoo! has found in your website, and “Inlinks” tells you how many links are coming to the site that they know of. But we need to filter this a little bit. So go ahead and click on the tab that says “Inlinks”.

Once you click on “Inlinks” you’ll see two drop down menus that say “From All Pages” and “Only this URL” respectively. This is how we are going to filter the information. The problem is that the number we see right now also includes when we are inter-linking on our own website. In fact, if you scroll down and look at some of the listings, you may see your own website on the list. Well, for backlinks we don’t care when we’re linking to ourself, so click on that first dropdown menu and choose “Except from this domain”. This will take all of the links from your own site off the list and just leave the links from other websites.

Once you do this the page is going to refresh and the number next to “Inlinks” will most likely drop. Now we move to the next box that currently says “Only this URL”. If we leave it like this we’ll see just the links that are coming to the home page. But if you want to see how many links are coming to the entire site, we need to change this second drop down menu to say “Entire Site”. At this point the page will refresh again and the numbers should change next to “Inlinks”.

Now you have the number of links that Yahoo! has found that are coming back to the website. If you want to get more information about these actual links you’ll need to go down the list and click on some of them. See if you can find your link on the page they are referencing and see what phrase is being used as your anchor text. I wouldn’t spend a ton of time doing this, but it’s a very easy way to see if your links are getting picked up by the search engines.

By: Dan Patterson

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About the Author:
Dan Patterson has been involved in website marketing for several years. He owns several of his own websites and also helps others to begin their own online businesses. You can see more of his tips for e-Commerce at eCommTips.com.