Probably the most important part of any webmasters tasks is backlinks.  If they want their site to rank high in the SERPs they need as many quality backlinks as possible.

But how do you know how many backlinks you have?

Well there are a few ways to check your backlink count, ranging from various software programs you can use to commands in your favourite search engine.

To check your backlinks in Google, similar to the “site:” operator, we use the “link:” operator.

link:123seotalk.com

After testing this out, you may have noticed that it’s not very accurate.  In fact Google only updates its backlink about once ever month and the best way of checking these is in your Google Webmaster account under external links.

Yahoo has a more up to date backlink count and will give you a better idea of your realtime backlinks.  To check these we can use the “site:” operator, like we do in Google, then click on the “Inlinks” button.  Or we can use a different operator:

linkdomain:123seotalk.com

This takes us straight to the Inlinks page and you can see realistically what backlinks you have.

There are quite a few other operators you can use to your advantage, see our Search Engine Tips page.

There are various other backlink checker websites which will do the same job and some even combine all the search engines in the one result so you can see at a glace your combined count.

On the software front, there’s one free tool called Link Popularity Check that I like to use which is very accurate and also allows you add your competitors websites allowing you to monitor their backlinks aswell.

Hopefully these tools will help you on your way to becoming a better webmaster!

Tags: backlink, checking, link