How to find all the links to my site

[ClaireH-184886]

hi i have been trying to find all the links that i have to my site http://www.clairehegarty.co.uk but i am not having any luck. I have used the open explorer but it is not showing all the links but when i go to my google webmaster page it shows me more pages than it does on the semoz tool.

can anyone help me sort this out and find out exactly what links are going into my site

many thanks

[KeriMorgret]

Hi Diane,

There is no one tool that is going to show you 100% of the links to your site. Google Webmaster Tools will show you a fair many, but even they do not show you all of the links that they know about. Still, that is probably the most complete information you will get.

Open Site Explorer is generally updated every month, and does not crawl the entire web, so the links it lists will be more delayed and fewer than what you see in GWT. The advantage that OSE has is that you can see links going to sites that are not your own (where you do not have access to GWT because it's not your site) and SEOmoz adds additional metrics that look at the value of the page the link is on.

Have you received any warnings about your links in Google Webmaster Tools, or are you wanting to know about the links just in general?

[ClaireH-184886]

i am wanting to know about the links in general. i am trying to find links that i have arranged and links that people have decided to add

[RyanKent]

Diane, Keri's response is very accurate. The only way you can know about every link to your site is to access a web crawler which has visibility to every page of every site in the world. There is no such crawler.

A few challenges:

• a website may link to your site but have the page noindex'd so the link is not captured by crawlers

• a website may link to your site but have the page blocked by robots.txt

• a website may link to your site but the page requires users to log in which a crawler is unable to do

• a web page may link to your site but the page is buried deep within a site, or an island page, or very low value (i.e. few or no links) so they page is not found

The results you seek are simply not possible in today's world. The best you can do is to use multiple tool sets so you can have the maximum level of visibility to links. I would recommend the following 5 tools: Google WMT, OSE, Majestic, Raven and Ahrefs.

For the most part, if a link exists to your site and you cannot find it in either OSE nor Google then the link likely has little to no value. An exception would be new links, especially if they are not on popular pages.

[Boodreaux]

nevermind

[ClaireH-184886]

thank you for that. I am going through the links now to see how i can improve the linking on my site and to see how relevant the links are.