How to check your backlinks with Yahoo! Site Explorer
March 8th, 2008 by hbond{{chris}} Often times people ask us how we can check the backlinks to their site. We’ve explained it a few times via email and over the phone so we thought we’d create a little video which explains it. It’s not rocket science – but it’s often the simplest of things that are not well documented and thus are hard to figure out for the first time.
The process is very simple and we’ll explain it here in text for those who like to read. For those who prefer video and audio, you can always skip right down to the video to have a look at that first if you prefer.
- Go to http://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com
- Type in the domain you want to explore, and presee the “Explore URL” button
- Yahoo! first returns a list of all pages indexed for that domain
- Change the “Show Inlinks” drop down to “Except from this domain”
- Then change the “To” drop down to “Entire Site”
- What Yahoo! returns is a count of the total inlinks to all pages in your site the detailed results for the first 1000.
- You can export the first 1000 links to a TSV file by clicking the “Export Results To TSV” link at the bottom and top left of the screen.
That’s it. You now have a complete list of backlinks (inlinks) coming to your site.
Hello, I really like this article. This is very useful and I will use it every week. Thanks for this great seo tool.
Thanks alot I never thought about using this tsv file
Great post CKATA. Your right. Sometimes the easiest things are the things we overlook or just don’t know. Yahoo is one of the easiest to get backlinks from and it helps the user in a great way. I am just not so sure that I like it publicised the way it is. I think that I would prefer more of a Google analytics platform that allows only the owner of the site to view all external links. Just my $.02
Good post as usual.
I checked it out since I never used it before. I prefer using googlepagerankchecker.com and backlinkwatch.com
When I use backlinkwatch, the font is smaller so I don’t have to keep flipping pages, I can see everything on one screen and merely have to scroll down.
Hey JACL,
You’re absolutely right about the openess of it. You’d think you would need to verify that you have control over the domain before doing indepth analysis like this. We use it all the time for competitive research ourselves.
The export function is a really nice one. Would be nice if Alexa would support exporting data.
As a relatively new blogger I’m always interested in things like this. Thank you for posting it. You are correct, alot of things in my field are rarely documented but easy to use and very effective. The same holds true for the ‘Net and blogging I’m starting to see.
I agree completely!
I can show you a way where not only you can check you backlinks, but the PR of the backlinks and the anchor text.
shoot me an email brainpflug@gmail.com if interested.
You can also use the link query (link:yoursite.com) at the Yahoo search bar and it will redirect you to the Yahoo Site Explorer..
@ JACL – All those tools use Yahoo’s data, just scrape it or get it throught the free API. They just package it differently (and most of the time in a more useful format).
Nobody but the big SE’s have the resources to crawl the web to get this sort of data, at least Yahoo! are nice enough to make it available for us to use through a freely accessible API, unlike Google and MSN.
I use SEO Quake for Firefox. It shows Pgerank, Google links, Yahoo links, Alexa rank, Site age and a bunch of other stuff. I only turn it on when I need it cause it slows everything down looking for info.
This is cool. I need to check the backlinks for my new site every now and then. Thanks for the guide!
Great post. I never knew this until I stumbled upon your blog.
I am going to bookmark your blog for future reference
I dont know why but i get more links in yahoo site explorer than i get in google…
Google and Yahoo! have seperated indexes. More importantly Google knowingly does not publish all of the backlinks they are aware of.
Yahoo! publishes most of them but we can never really be sure if that’s all of them!
Thanks for this tutorial.
I don’t understand one thing. I have over 300 backlinks to mysite. However, when perform the same search on Google, I only have three.
Now I unerstand.Thanks
If only Google was this good. By the way, if you search in Yahoo, linkdomain:www.yoursite.com -site:www.yoursite.com then you get the backlinks minus your own.
Hello just came across your blog and i thank you for your article it was interesting. I am interested about link building for my website too. Have you used the scrapebox.com program? If so is it good? If not then what is the best tool? Thank you.
completely true that yahoo is a great engine for checking your backlinks (and a little more) as it seems more accurate than others when it comes to Inlinks…anyway i do check my site’s status with this online tool: http://ministatus.com