Do you know how many people are actually linking to your website? Like a lot of people, you probably have gone to Google, typed in link:yourdomain.com and had a peek at how many links there were. Even a lot of software will use the same method - looking for exactly that hyperlink within webpages. The problem is that this is very innacurate and gives you only a small glimpse into a much bigger picture.

How can that be?

Hyperlinking is far more advanced these days. It is common for many sites to have their links coded for statistical purposes or simply because the software they run on their server creates coded links so that sites can be easily edited or removed from the database. They may look something like this:

"www.somedomain.com/links.asp?url=http://yourwebsite.com" or "www.somedomain.com/links.php?link=345"

There may be other reasons and variations of urls too, however the point is that because these links are coded, a simple backlink check just won't work. So while it may appear that only 100 sites are linking to you, it could actually be 1000's.

Case in Point: One of my websites shows only 74 exact backlinks through a basic check, when in fact there are about 11,800 links. While it is almost impossible to know just how many of those links are active (clickable), cross-referencing my own statistics supported these results.

Try it yourself. Type in something like:

"yourdomain.com"

But what about internal links from within your site showing up as backlinks? Wouldn't that skew the actual backlink count?

You're right, but you can easily exclude your own domain from the results by simply typing in:

"yourdomain.com" -site:yourdomain.com

Do the non-hyperlinked references really count?

I believe they do qualify as valuable backlinks (though I do prefer to call them references instead). Look at it this way, business cards contain your website url but aren't clickable. So what makes non-hyperlinks on the web any less valuable? If people want to visit, they can copy and paste the link or type it in themselves. In fact, there is less chance of typos because of this.

The Traffic Time Forgot...

Another useful function of this method is the ability to locate dead spaces where people are linking to pages you no longer have on your website and perhaps have forgotten about. While 404 redirects and messages are fine for catching the traffic, why would you waste the space? These are prime areas to bring life to and can easily be filled with monetized content.

About 6 months ago I did a complete redesign of one of my websites. This meant removing a lot of pages that I was no longer using as I was condensing everything. A few weeks ago, I was doing a backlink check and noticed a large number of links and references (100's actually) pointing to a page which I had long forgotten about. What was suprising is that the majority of these backlinks were coded, so that they did not show up in a basic link check. Instead of letting the 404 catcher manage it, I decided to recreate it with still relevant content and much to my surprise, it still had a pagerank of 5 immediately after being uploaded.

Imagine That!

Carole Nickerson has been a web developer and internet marketer since 1998. She now spends her days actively filling up her new blog with all she has learned. To find more free internet marketing articles, web promotion tips, and free resources like this visit: CaroleNickerson.com

• Get Off the Country Road and Get On the Highway


• How to Draw Traffic to Your Site


• Top Traffic Generation Techniques


• Website Traffic Is Not The Key To Success


• Check Yahoo Mail: Get Free Targeted Traffic Like Yahoo


• Increase Web Site Traffic With These 7 Ways


• Your Business Story In Leading Blogs And Article Directories Will Yield Very High Traffic For You


• Viral Marketing Techniques You Can Use To Increase Your Traffic


• Simple, Effective Web Site Traffic Promotion


• Maximize Free Manual Traffic Exchanges


• Building Better Traffic for Your Web Site


• The Steps Before Website Traffic