As you work to optimize your site, write great new content, and get links to your site, occasionally it’s good to get a “report card”—to find out how you’re doing. One of the things I usually want to know is how many people are linking to my site.

How Do I Count Links to a Site?

Most search engines provide a command similar to the following line:

Most, however, provide results that are not all that accurate. Even Google provides results that vary and are incomplete.

Count Links with Yahoo

Yahoo provides a search command that provides a very accurate list of the links to a site. If you wanted to count the links to DiamondLime, for example, you would use the following command in the Yahoo search box:

The first part (linkdomain) counts all the links from any page to any page on your site. The second part subtracts all the pages that are in your site from the results so that you have an accurate count of external links. If you want to know how many links there are including internal links on your site, just leave out the “-site…” part.

Scope Out Your Competition

One final note: this tactic also works on your competition—you can go find out how many (and which) links your competitors have and build strategies to emulate or counter these strategies.