6. Who’s Linking to Your Site?

It’s a big wide world out there, with literally millions of topics to monitor, but we’re going to start close to home—with your own Web site.

You may remember that in the last chapter I discussed the differences between external and internal information. Internal information is information out on the Web that mentions, references, or discusses a Web site you are interested in tracking. External information is everything else.

When I do presentations about search engines and information trapping, many people ask me how they can track which Web sites are linking to theirs and what they’re saying about it. So wanting to trap this type of internal information seems to be a common theme. If you don’t have a Web site for which you want to track interest, you may want to skip this chapter. If you do have a Web site, you probably have an audience, and this chapter is your opportunity to learn what that audience thinks of your site!

Advantages of Sleuthing Your Own Site

There are several reasons you might want to know who’s linking to your site or who’s reading it.

• Plain ol’ human curiosity. You’re putting in a great deal of time and effort into making a Web site available. Wouldn’t you wonder just a little bit who’s linking to it and what they’re saying about it?

• To help your business. If someone’s linking to you with cheers, you want to brag. If they’re linking with jeers, you want to know how you can make it right.

• To target your content and services. Perhaps you run a library Web site, or an ad-driven content site. Knowing what people are saying about your site can help you focus your content for your audience (“I found a great article about x but I wish they’d cover y”). And if you know what kinds of sites are linking to yours, you can approach more of those types of sites and ask whether they’d like to link to you as well. The more incoming links, the more people can find you. And that’s good!

Trapping General Site Links

Let’s start our overview of internal information traps by looking at links to sites. To track this, we begin with the usual suspects: Google and Yahoo.

Google

To track who’s linking to your site in Google, you need to use the link syntax like this:

link:http://www.cnn.com

Unfortunately, Google’s link syntax does not work with any other keywords or any other syntax. So you can’t do a query like this:

link:http://www.cnn.com site:edu

to find all pages from the .edu domain that link to CNN.com. (You can do that with Yahoo, as you’ll see in a minute.) In addition, Google’s link syntax checks the exact URL you’re looking for—it doesn’t find all pages within that domain that are being linked to.

Google’s strengths lie in the fact that it updates its index fairly frequently, so you can pick up a lot of fresh links from its database. But you’ll have a lot of links to pore through and you’ll have to do a lot of the organizing yourself.

Yahoo

Because it can use other syntax and keywords in conjunction with the link syntax, Yahoo is a great way to track not only how many pages are linking to your site but also what kinds of pages are linking to your site. Yahoo offers two syntax for tracking page links:

• Link syntax. Use the link syntax when you want to find sites that are linking to one specific page of yours. You use this syntax just like you would with Google: link:http://www.cnn.com.

• Linkdomain. Use linkdomain when you want to find all the pages that are pointing to a particular domain, instead of just one page. The syntax looks like this: linkdomain:www.cnn.com. Note that you do not use http:// with this syntax; if you do it will fail and you won’t get any results.

Yahoo also makes a tool available for getting information about sites that are linking to a given URL; it’s called Site Explorer.

Yahoo’s Site Explorer

Instead of using query words to search, start using Site Explorer (siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/) by typing in a simple URL, such as the URL for your Web site. When you do that, Yahoo gives you a results page with a list of the pages from that domain which Yahoo has indexed. (That’s good to know; the more pages from your domain that Yahoo has indexed, the easier it will be for other people to find your site.) The full number of pages will be at the top of the results list. Beside that number is the number of pages that Yahoo has indexed that link to the URL you specified, with a hyperlink so that you can see the list (Figure 6.1).

Figure 6.1. You’ll find a variety of page links to your site using Site Explorer.

Unfortunately, Yahoo only lets you see the first 1,000 results from each list, which is frustrating if you have more than a few thousand links to your site because you know you’re missing most of them. Yahoo does offer the ability to export the results into a text file that can be opened in Excel, but you get the results fifty at a time (in other words, if you want to export a list of a thousand pages that link to your site, you’ll have to export a list of results twenty times).

It doesn’t appear that Yahoo Site Explorer lists its site links in order of date, so you can’t easily monitor the results list for new additions. However, you can monitor the first results page and watch how the numbers at the top of the screen change—that is, you can keep track of the count of pages linking to your URL, and the count of pages indexed by Yahoo.com.

Narrowing your search

Yahoo indexes billions of pages, so take the opportunity to narrow down the kinds of results you get using Site Explorer. Remember how I told you in the last chapter that different kinds of domains (.edu, .com, .org, etc.) sometimes have different flavors? You can take advantage of that here. You can set up a search for your domain and add site:edu to see what .edu sites are linking to you. Or perhaps there’s a particular country whose links you are most interested in; you could use that country’s code in conjunction with a link search.

And of course you can do plain keyword searches, too. Maybe you’d like to find out what sites are linking to you but mentioning a competitor, or linking to you and linking to a competitor? (You can do two link searches in one query!) Once you begin using other syntax and keywords in conjunction with a link or linkdomain search, the possibilities are (almost) endless.

Say you’re the CEO of Example.com and you want to monitor which sites are linking to you and linking to CNN.com. That’s easy—your search would look like this:

link:http://www.example.com link:http://www.cnn.com

Or say you’ve got a blog and you want to know how many college Web pages are linking to you. In this case, you’d enter:

link:http://www.example.com site:edu

Or what if you want to know who’s linking to you but mentioning the name of your competitor? You’d enter this in the query box:

link:http://www.example.com WidgetCo

Remember, you want complete but manageable!

If you can think of keywords that are at all relevant, try to use them; narrowing down your results is important. Excluding your own domain from the results helps, such as in the following example:

linkdomain:www.example.com -site:example.com

Using Yahoo’s RSS feeds

Yahoo offers RSS feeds of its search results, but you have to enter the URL yourself. So, for example, you’d enter the following URL and then substitute your query for the word keyword at the end:

http://api.search.yahoo.com/WebSearchService/rss/webSearch.
xml?appid=yahoosearchwebrss&query=keyword.

You’ll find more information about Yahoo Web RSS feeds, and the encoding options for them, in the next chapter. Seeing who’s linking to you across the entire Web is useful, but it does have its limitations. You might get the same results and find that the same pages are indexed over and over, or you might miss some of the more minor links to your pages.

To get a timely sense of who’s linking to your site, you want to check RSS feed search engines that can sort their results by date.

Trapping Links in RSS Feeds

Trapping links from RSS feeds has one massive advantage: the feeds can be sorted by date. You know when you get a new hit that it will be fresh; it won’t be something that’s been wandering around a search engine index for the last few years. And because most RSS feeds are oriented toward blogs, you also know your results will be mostly commentary. That’s all good.

You have two major options when you want to check for links in RSS feeds. Both Technorati and IceRocket offer link searches.

Technorati

In Technorati’s (technorati.com) early days, I spent a lot of time using it to check links. Nowadays, Technorati does a decent job of searching for tags and keywords. But it’s even better at checking for links to sites, which is mostly what I use it for.

You don’t need to use any syntax to check for links; just enter the URL that you want to monitor in the Website URL Search form. You will get a list of all pages which link to that domain or URL, with the most recent links at the top (Figure 6.2).

Figure 6.2. Checking for links to CNNSI.com. Note that Technorati also shows when the result was found.

Luckily Technorati doesn’t care if you use http:// with the URL. It displays a list of the blogs that link to that URL or a URL in that domain, with the most recent ones listed first.

You also have the option to “claim” your site. Claiming your site means that you prove to Technorati that you own your domain (this usually involves pasting a little snippet of code on your site). Once you’ve done that, you have the option of adding some additional information about your blog to Technorati and getting some information on your Technorati account page about the popularity and number of links to your site.

I find that sometimes Technorati delivers a false positive on a site that is on a link list, but is not part of an active Weblog discussion. On the other hand, it will sometimes find results that I didn’t see on IceRocket.

If you don’t have an account with Technorati, the easiest way to monitor its search results is with a page monitor. But I really recommend you get an account—it’s free and only requires a name and e-mail address.

IceRocket

IceRocket (icerocket.com) is a relatively new search engine that offers searches for a variety of collections, from the expected (news and blogs) to the unanticipated (MySpace). IceRocket isn’t as famous as Google or even Technorati, but I occasionally find results here that I don’t find anywhere else (Figure 6.3).

Figure 6.3. Searching for links in IceRocket doesn’t require a special syntax, just a URL.

When you use IceRocket to sleuth out other links to your site, you don’t need to use syntax; you just enter your site’s URL, including http://. IceRocket displays a list of results sorted by date.

The only disadvantage I’ve encountered with this site is that sometimes you get multiple copies of the same entry in your list of results.

IceRocket offers RSS feeds of its search results. Just click the Subscribe button at the top of the search results page and you’re ready to go.

Who’s Reading Your RSS Feeds?

Tracking who’s linking to you is something you can do to an extent via your Web site logs. But sometimes that doesn’t give you the whole picture; some people have their referrers turned off in their browser (the browser doesn’t tell the server from what URL they came to visit your site), and you’ll completely miss pages that have links but don’t send you any browsers. Using Web logs and external, Web-based resources at the same time can give you a fuller picture about what people are saying when they link to your site.

Getting an idea of how many people are visiting or reading certain parts of your site, including RSS feeds, is a different story. Web site logs are going to give you most of what you need to know, as far as sheer numbers are concerned. But Bloglines can give you counts and a little more information about where your information fits in the RSS/blog universe.

Bloglines (bloglines.com) indexes over 600 million articles (as of this writing) from millions of blogs and news sources. You can use Bloglines to both search for links to your site as well as see how many people are reading your RSS feed in Bloglines.

On the upper right side of the page is a query box, followed by a Search For Citations pull-down menu (Figure 6.5). Enter your URL there, and you get a list of sites that have linked to yours, sorted by date.

Figure 6.5. Bloglines makes it easy to see who’s citing your site.

Each result includes the blog name, author name, how recently the post was made, and a small snippet. Hold your cursor over the More Info item underneath the search result to see the number of subscribers that RSS feed has in Bloglines, as well as how many other posts on Bloglines are citing that search result.

Want to know how many subscribers your own blog has in Bloglines? Easy as pie. Go back to the search box and use the pull-down menu to select Search for Feeds. Enter the name of your blog (you’ll have to do a little tweaking if the name isn’t unique) and you get a list of search results that include the URL of the feed, title, description, and number of subscribers (Figure 6.6).

Figure 6.6. Bloglines tracks how many people are reading a particular feed using its service.

Now, will knowing how many people read your feed using Bloglines tell you how many people overall read your feed using every possible RSS reader? No. But it can give you a good sense of whether you’re popular (is anyone reading your RSS feed?). And it may be that you have more readers than you think.

Moving from Internal to External Information

Internal information, like URLs, numbers of readers, and content, covers a lot of the basic stuff that defines the information you provide online and reveals what your readers are like—the kind of community you are generating. If you own or manage a business, it’s probably obvious to you that you need to track this. But even if you’re not a business owner or manager, the knowledge of what kind of readership you have on your Web site, what they say about it, and how they link to it can be immensely valuable.

Now let’s move further out from internal information to the sites and topics that interest you but don’t necessarily involve you. Let’s move to external information and where to find it.