SEO Tycoon

**Joe3000** · 03-13-2008, 10:37 AM

The SEO tool for Firefox lists separate groups of sites that link to your site but can one get a list of all the pages/sites on the internet that link to a site?

Thanks.

**willcode4beer** · 03-13-2008, 01:19 PM

and all this time I was just using my referrer logs.....

**Joe3000** · 03-13-2008, 02:32 PM

I didnt realise they would show you all the sites that link to my site, even if no one follows them.

**Learning Newbie** · 03-13-2008, 03:07 PM

Of course they don't. But if no one follows the links they aren't worth knowing about.

**ADAM Web Design** · 07:58 PM

You can get this through Google's Webmaster Tools.

CAVEAT: GWT doesn't separate between followed, nofollowed, quality, crap, any of that stuff. It's just a raw link dump and as such, is almost as useless as the link operator.

If you want to know how well you're doing, do what Paul said and use your referrer logs or site stats.

**willcode4beer** · 03-13-2008, 07:57 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Joe3000

I didnt realise they would show you all the sites that link to my site, even if no one follows them.

I'm with John on this. Why would I care about links that nobody follows?

Links that people do follow do a few things for me to build a community:

If it happened as a result of someone's social networking, I can help support it.
If it is a related site with information, I might (and often do) link back to it
It tells me who finds my information useful, allowing me to target that group on future articles, which means they build links for me
Links from blogs/social sites often contain useful comments, I can use these to improve my content
I can (and often do) link back to a site with comments for users to leave comments there. This is great for community and saves me bandwidth and DB space.

An example of the last one is instead of hosting comments, put a link to digg/slashdot/reddit/dzone/etc for folks to leave comments on those sites.

**Technocrat** · 12:32 AM

I know a site that will do what I think you are looking for but I wanted to comment on the no follow discussion here. Not sure if it's specific to the nofollow tag, or just links that no one clicks. (Often one in the same I guess lol)

Concerning the tag from Google "From now on, when Google sees the attribute (rel="nofollow") on hyperlinks, those links won't get any credit when we rank websites in our search results. This isn't a negative vote for the site where the comment was posted; it's just a way to make sure that spammers get no benefit from abusing public areas like blog comments, trackbacks, and referrer lists."

An example being that just about every page on most websites link back to the home page, but will also probably link to a privacy policy or terms of service. Since a privacy policy or TOS page isin't something you probably want someone landing on or ranking high in search engines, you can lower their visibility with nofollow links and potentially increase the visibility of your pages linking to them.

So goes the common thought that nofollow links are basically useless from a linking stand point and only good for delivering traffic or sculpting. That's mostly true,

But:

Some search engines do not recognize rel=nofollow, ASK is one of the large engines that does not recognize it and there are many smaller ones that do not. The results of these smaller engines can on rare occasions be picked up by some of the bigger ones. I would never recommend going on a nofollow linking campaign, but it's just something to keep in mind.

As far as a link that no one actually clicks on, while it's always preferable to have someone click thru I don't know if I would go so far as to say they aren't worth having. I think a link from a site with good content that relates to your website is worth having whether someone clicks it or not.

Anyway, I use a tool online fairly often that checks backlinks for sites. It's better then having to wait for someone to click thru, and it also helps you discover people who have placed a link to your website in a remote location. It also lets you know the PR of the site, and whether or not it's a rel=nofollow or not.

Backlinks Checker Tool - I'm no way affiliated with the site, just one I know that I thought this might be something you would find helpful.

**nemo27** · 03-15-2008, 02:30 AM

I've found that Yahoo site explorer is pretty goof for this. Go to Yahoo, then search for:

link:www.mysite.com

Yahoo seems to update its backlink database much more frequently than Google.

**dejvo01** · 03-20-2008, 08:03 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by nemo27

I've found that Yahoo site explorer is pretty goof for this. Go to Yahoo, then search for:

link:www.mysite.com

Yahoo seems to update its backlink database much more frequently than Google.

Yahoo also show you all backlinks and Google not...
Yahoo site explorer is updated daily...

**Learning Newbie** · 03-20-2008, 12:56 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Technocrat

I know a site that will do what I think you are looking for but I wanted to comment on the no follow discussion here. Not sure if it's specific to the nofollow tag, or just links that no one clicks. (Often one in the same I guess lol)

There is no nofollow tag. Nofollow is a widely recognized value that can sometimes be found in an attribute of hyperlink anchor tags. This is important because if we can't talk about the building blocks and know what each other are saying, we'll never be able to build anything with them.

That said, nofollow links are very often clicked on. I'd love to see some stats, which probably don't exist in the aggregate, but I would bet you a cup of coffee that nofollow links are clicked on more often than non nofollow (aka "dofollow") links. I'm constantly clicking links in blog comments, mainly the ones a user signed with when they write something intelligent. I get a great deal of referral traffic from similar comments I've left on my WordPress.com hosted brother's sites. AdSense is javascript, which isn't nofollow exactly, but accomplishes the same thing - namely, hiding links from search engines, and also being able to generate them dynamically. These are clicked very often.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Technocrat

Some search engines do not recognize rel=nofollow, ASK is one of the large engines that does not recognize it and there are many smaller ones that do not.

Ask isn't a large search engine any more than <nofollow> is a tag.</nofollow> They are advertising, tho, on NPR no less.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Technocrat

The results of these smaller engines can on rare occasions be picked up by some of the bigger ones. I would never recommend going on a nofollow linking campaign, but it's just something to keep in mind.

Google works very hard to prevent search results from being indexed. It still happens, and it annoys me when it does. But I wouldn't count on that as part of any type of campaign.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Technocrat

As far as a link that no one actually clicks on, while it's always preferable to have someone click thru I don't know if I would go so far as to say they aren't worth having. I think a link from a site with good content that relates to your website is worth having whether someone clicks it or not.

You're right, not worth having was an exaggeration, and not altogether accurate. But value isn't a boolean, it's more of a gradient, almost analogue. If you have a link on somebody's new blog, launched yesterday, taking click referrals out of the picture, that new blog has no link juice to send. A link, by itself, is such a wide range of possibilities.