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Filed under:
Internet and Blogging by
Hari
Posted on Sat, Oct 8, 2005 at 08:31 IST (last updated: Wed, Jul 16, 2008 @ 20:27 IST)
Yesterday I was carrying out a very interesting exercise and I thought I would share it here. I was extremely curious to find out any places on the web which linked to my website. So I did some investigation and came up with some interesting results.
I used Google and Yahoo to do the search, but I guess you can use other search engines as well to maximize your results. How do you do this? Let's assume that your web URL is www.mysite.com. Do a web search with the following strings:
- Google
www.mysite.com and click Find web pages that link to www.mysite.com and also Find web pages that contain the term "www.mysite.com".
- Google
mysite and go through the results.
- Google your site title (as it appears in the browser's title bar) or a description of your site within double quotes.
This will yield quite a few interesting results. You can repeat this exercise with Yahoo and other search engines like Teoma or MSN, except that you might have to use a different search string when looking for sites that link to www.mysite.com. If you are really imaginative, you might try other combinations of keywords to maximize your results. To really benefit from this research, you need to take your time to go through each item in the search result carefully. You'll find that many of them don't link to your site after all. Some of the links might be dead. Others might have changed since the last time the search engine indexed it. The fact that most websites these days are dynamic in nature makes it that much more difficult for you to track search engine results with a good deal of accuracy. Again you will find many of the incoming links might be within your own site and you'll have to sift through all those redundant results. However, persistence can be rewarding! You might find a rare mention of your website in a place you least expect. You might find that somebody has included your website in a web directory or a community bookmarks site. You might find a commentary of an article you had written in somebody's blog. You might even find that somebody, in a community that you don't even know existed, has recommended your forum as a good place to be. The web is a *huge* ocean. Let me tell you that the very recognition of your website's existence in places you least expect can give you great satisfaction.
Talking of search engines, link popularity and search engine optimization is an extremely interesting topic and would be of great use to webmasters who want to maximize their traffic. I found this link popularity checker to be a very useful tool to determine how some popular search engines rank my site. I hope you find it useful as well!
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