When starting a link building campaign (or continuing one), you want to be able to check your progress and see if you are indeed building any backlinks to your site. You want to be able to see if any of the links are “nofollow”, what anchor text is being used for the links, and what quality of site the links are on. Since I have gotten into link building, I have been steadily compiling a list of sites that allow you to check your backlinks. You may have heard of searching Google with “link: yourwebsite.com.” While this does work, it discourages many new (and even some experienced) webmasters because Google doesn’t include all of the links they have listed to your site. Sometimes, they don’t show any. Move beyond using this tool, and try out some of the websites below.

Not all of these sites are created equal, and I don’t think any of them can give you a definite 100% list of the amount of links that you have online pointing back to your site. That being said, some are definitely better than others. I am going to give you a summary of each one. Try them all out, and find out which ones work best for your needs, and for your specific sites.

WARNING: Do not use all of the sites listed. This will be a waste of your time that could be used for building links. Instead, find the few that work best for your site, and don’t compare the stats between the sites. Instead, start a spreadsheet and weekly check and log the amount of backlinks listed on each of the resources, and compare the number to the amount listed on the SAME resource a week ago. That will give you a much better idea of your progress.

When you’re done with these, check out more backlink checkers at: How to Check Your Backlinks – Part 2

SEO Pro’s Link Checker – My Recommendation!
http://seopro.com.au/free-seo-tools/link-checker/
This is a very fantastic backlink checking service. Although it takes a little while (not too long) to populate the list of URL’s, this is one of the few tools in this whole list that actually shows the true pagerank of the pages your URL is on. It also tell you how many links are on that page, whether or not the link uses “nofollow”, the anchor text for the link. You also have the ability to check the number of backlinks for all of the pages on your site, or just the top domain. If you are going to just use one backlink checker, then use this one!

SubmitEdge’s PageRank Checker Tool + Alexa Tool + Link Checker Tool http://www.submitedge.com/pr.html
This tool will just give you stats, and that’s about it. No list of links, no link PR breakdown, nothing… just a few basic stats about your website. Great, for a nice quick check and then getting back to content creation or linkbuilding. It will list your PR, your Alexa ranking, whether or not you are listed in DMOZ, and how many backlinks you have listed on Google, Yahoo!, AltaVista and AllTheWeb. (The “backlinks from Google” used the “link: yourwebsite.com” method to search, therefore you’ll get the same wack results I mentioned in the first paragraph.)

RankAlert’s Backlink Watch Tool
http://rankalert.net/backlink-watch.php
This is a pretty nice tool if all you’re interested in is the number of backlinks, what page the links are on, and the pagerank for those pages. This tool will give you the results for the first 1000 links. It will tell you the number of total links (even if it’s above 1000) and it will show you the URL of the pages that the link is on, and the PageRank of that site.

iWebTool’s Backlink Checker
http://www.iwebtool.com/backlink_checker
This is a pretty basic tool. It just shows you the total number of links, the pages that the links are listed on, and PageRank (note, that the PageRank tool was showing up “zero” for every single page as of this writing. Hopefully they fix it in the future.) The benefit of this site is that it is fast loading. Other tools in this list take a while when they actually list the URLs your page is being linked from, but this is a very fast loading tool.

Smart PageRank’s BackLink PageRank Check
http://www.smartpagerank.com/pagerank-backlinks.php
This is a pretty good site, because it is fairly fast loading, even if you choose the options that they say will make it slower. This site will show you the URL, the PageRank (not, it shows “zero” for sites that have verified page rank), and it can show the anchor text and whether or not it’s a “nofollow” link. You can choose how many URLs are listed on each page, which is a feature I really like.

Backlink Watch’s Backlinks Checker Tool
http://www.backlinkwatch.com/index.php
This is a pretty good tool for checking every 2 months or so. They cache your results, and you’ll get the same results for about the next 2 months or so. I was stuck at “915” backlinks for one of my new niche sites for a long time, until I realized that they use a cached result. All of that aside, it’s a good tool for seeing all of your links, and some information about those links you’ve gotten while link building. The problem is that it is slow. If you have any amount about 200 or so, you will be waiting for a very long time to see all of the results. But, they do breakdown the anchor text of the link, the URL it is found at, and any “flagged” links such as those with “nofollow.”

Professional Link Building’s Free Website Valuation
http://www.professionallinkbuilding.com/websitevaluation.aspx

You need to sign up to their site for free to use this feature now….This is a very quick tool. It gives you your page rank, the number of backlinks you have, and your Alexa ranking. WARNING: The number of backlinks listed for your site from this tool will be way higher than all of your other tools. It is an inflated average of all of the links found in Google, Yahoo, MSN, Live, and others combined. I still use this tool to see how much I’ve grown by comparing it to this tool’s stats from each week, but comparing this number to all of the other tools will only make you feel better artificially. They also have a little “How much is my site worth?” type of algorithm at the end.

WARNING: Do not use this site’s “Free Link Building” on the left hand side of the bar. This will not get you quality links and make google find a lot of 404’s when crawling your site. It is not worth it.

I hope these tools helps you in all of your regular and one way link building campaigns. My welcome post for this blog spoke a lot about setting and reaching goals, and these tools will help you gauge whether or not you’ve met some goals with each link building campaign you embark on.

If you’ve been doing any kind of reading about link building, then you’ve probably seen people mentioning “nofollow” and “dofollow” links. These are very important terms to understand when you are trying to build great links back to your site in order to increase your search engine rankings. But, to the person who is new to all of this, it may be kind of confusing. I am going to help break it down for you.

When creating a link on a webpage using HTML, the standard code for that link is:

Search Engine Optimization

It includes the HTML tag, the URL the link will be going to, the text that will be shown on the webpage for that link, and the closing HTML tag.

You are able to add more HTML to the code above, in order to tell the search engine spiders whether or not you want them to follow the link when crawling your website. You may be thinking… “Why wouldn’t I want the search engine spiders to see all of the links on my site?” This is a very valid concern, which I will address further down. First, I am going to show you how to modify the HTML in order to tell the search engine spiders to crawl a link or not.

To tell the spiders to crawl a link, you don’t have to do anything. Simply using the format shown above, the search engine spiders will crawl the link provided.

To tell the spiders to NOT crawl a link, you need to add the following code to the HTML code above:

rel="nofollow"

It would then look like:

Search Engine Optimization

Basically, there is no true “dofollow”, it is just NOT using the “nofollow” tag. Pretty simple, eh? (No, I am not Canadian… well, kind of.)

Why does this matter?
When you are using different methods (hopefully from this site) in order to build links on other websites (to increase your search engine rankings), you need to determine if the websites you are attempting to get your site listed on use the “nofollow” tag or not. If they do, it may still be a good idea to try to get that link there, but it is generally regarded as not the best use of time since the search engines don’t follow that link and you don’t get any increase in search engine rankings from that link.

So, when you are looking for sites and blogs that you could leave your link on (through reciprocal links, commenting on a blog, directory submissions, buying links, etc) figure out if the links in the particular section of the site you are aiming for uses “nofollow” or not. (A good way to do this is to view the source code, or find some good “dofollow” lists such as Courtney Tuttle’s D-list )

Why wouldn’t I want the search engine spiders to see all of the links on my site? (Or, Why would I use “nofollow”?)

There are many reasons you would want to use the “nofollow” tag, such as:
1) Paid Links: This is recommended by Google. Essentially, your sites page rank give a small amount of rank juice to the sites you link to (which helps their search engine ranking, which is the purpose of link building, to get that juice from others). If you have a paid link on your site, it’s essentially buying a higher rank in Google. They don’t like that.

2) Maybe in your blog’s comment section (if using most blog software, this is automatic). It is up to you if you want your commentators to get link juice back to their site. It is personal preference.

3) When linking to major, very popular sites. If you are linking to google.com, yahoo.com, digg.com (the front page), cnn.com, or whoever else, they are already popular, so you might as well use “nofollow” since your link won’t make or break them.

I hope this has been helpful. Feel free to comment or use the contact link in the top right of the page if you have any questions about this, or any link building subject.

UPDATE: Now that you know what dofollow is, you can easily find dofollow blogs with my DoFollow Blogs Search Engine, DoFollow Diver!

Welcome to the Link Building Bible.

If you’ve come to this site, you’re probably interested in link building and how backlinks can dramatically increase your search engine rankings. I am interested in this type of search engine marketing too, and I am attempting to create a resource that you can keep coming back to for more ideas on how to promote your blog or website.

What is the goal of the Link Building Bible?
When starting any type of project, it is good to have goals in mind. One reason to have goals set is to know when you’ve reached a milestone. Setting attainable goals is important when starting a project so that you know what you are striving for and you also know when you’ve reached the set goals. At that point, you are able to continue to set higher and higher goals for yourself and your project. You should use these principles about setting goals when embarking on link building campaigns.

So, what are the goals for this project?
The first goal is to become a great list of ideas for link building. I will not be including black hat methods in this project. Yes, black hat methods work, but I will be focusing on legit, white hat methods (maybe grey hat, at times). I want people who are both brand new and people who have done link building for a while, to be able to come here and find information to help them to build more backlinks for their site, to ever increase their rankings in the search engines. If you’ve been doing link building for a while, then some of the information here will be stuff that you already know. I will still be making such posts, because there are some who are new and don’t know a thing about link building.

The second goal is to provide a resource for people to use this site as a springboard for their own link building projects. One of the main ways I will be doing this is by allowing people to guest post. By being a guest poster at the Link Building Bible, you will be able to 1) get a backlink, 2) get some traffic and notoriety and, 3) provide others with a valuable resource in their journey of link building.

Enjoy your journey of building backlinks.