How to Check Backlinks on Yahoo!

June 7th, 2007 in Tutorials/Helps, Website Tools by Dan

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. This is a very legitimate question to have! So how can we check? There are several different things you can do, but today we’re going to focus on how to check how many backlinks Yahoo! says that you have. Keep in mind, you have probably built more than this, these are just the ones that Yahoo! has picked up.

First, go to www.yahoo.com and click inside the search bar. 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 page just a little bit, you’ll see where it says “Results”, and right below that it says “Pages (number) | Inlinks (number)”. “Pages” is telling you how many pages Yahoo! has found in this website, and “Inlinks” is telling you how many links are coming to the site. But we need to filter this a little bit. So go ahead and click on “Inlinks”.

Once you click on “Inlinks” you’ll see two drop down menus. By default they will 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 the website. In fact, if you scroll down and look at some of the listings, you may see your own website down there. 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.

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”.

The page will now refresh again, and if you’ve done things right you the drop down boxes should look like this:

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.

Tomorrow I’ll show you another way you can use this information. Until then, happy link-building!

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