If you’ve only ever used Google to find out who’s linking back to you; you’re only getting half the story.. and perhaps far less.

Knowing how many backlinks you have isn’t just to satisfy your ego. Simply knowing doesn’t do anything to increase your search engine ranking either; but by monitoring who is linking to your web site; you can stay abreast about what’s being said about your business, perhaps join in conversations or to foster more involved partnerships.

The query used in Google to determine who is linking to your site is:

link:www.yoursite.com

.. but it only displays a subset of the real number of results, and rather randomly too. The Google link: command will show a mix of high and low ranking sites .. and garbage sites such as splogs (spam blogs) and scraper sites.

Here’s a couple of tools for gaining a better insight into who is linking to you:

Serph – a new service I mentioned a couple of days ago. Serph is a great way to ascertain who’s linking to you in the blogosphere and from social media sites – and to get very fresh results. Serph aggregates data from a number of high profile sources including Technorati and Digg.

Yahoo SiteExplorer – you’re likely to see a huge difference in backlink counts by using SiteExplorer.

– Go to Search.Yahoo.com
– Type in link:www.yoursite.com
– You’ll then be transported to Site Explorer
– On the dropdowns, select “Except from this domain” and “entire site”
– Done!

If you’ve been using Google solely to track backlinks, using the above two tools provide you with a very nice surprise and a stack of new sites to follow up on :).

Related:

Search engine optimization tips, tutorials and articles

Tips for successful partnership canvassing