Who is Linking to Your Site?

Finding out who is linking to your website is a great way of assessing how much you have to do through SEO to gain a search engine presence. There are a number of tools available online to make the process easier, but the best one (in my opinion of course) is the Yahoo Site Explorer. Here's how to use it!

Let's run an example search with Youtube.

1. Visit www.yahoo.com

2. Ensure that you are not redirected to your local Yahoo. If you are, you will find a 'Yahoo.com' icon in the top left of the screen. Click on that. You must be on Yahoo.com to use the tool and not on a local version of the site.

3. Type into the search bar, as if you were going to search for something. You need to type 'link:' and then the domain you want to find out about. So in this case: link:youtube.com (as below).


4. This will take you to a page that shows all the links pointing to the Youtube domain. However, at the moment this includes links from on Youtube page to another as well. What is more relevant, usually, when it comes to making an assessment from an SEO perspective, is how many links there are from outside websites.


You can filter this to show just levels from outside sites. Where you see it says "Show inlinks" followed by a drop down menu with (by default) 'From all pages,' simply click on that drop down menu and change it to 'Except from this domain.' That will update the listings to reveal only links from other sites that point into the Youtube site.

You can use this tool to search the links to any website at all!