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How can I verify who links to me?
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I need to verify all the inbound links I have coming in to my site. I've tried using OSE but have been told it does not scrape many smaller sites so cannot be sure of it's accuracy (especially since when I ran it, it returned a small % of the link i know are out there).
Is there a way to do this in Analytics? Or another way?
Thanks
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There has to be a way to see all links pointing to your site...
Actually, there is not.
Any tool which provides a report of links to your site has to collect the data somehow. The most common means is to crawl the internet, collecting data on each page that is encountered. There are very few organizations which have sufficient resources to crawl billions of web pages and process the data in a timely manner. Google is by far the most efficient.
Even so, web pages can be blocked by various methods:
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the page could be on a member-only part of the site which requires a username and password to view. Such a page cannot be discovered by crawlers.
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the page could be tagged with noindex, nofollow to where the link is not discovered. It can also be blocked with robots.txt
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the link may be presented in an iframe, flash or other means which the crawler does not capture.
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the page may be buried so deeply on a site, or on an island page, where the crawler does not ever reach it.
In the above cases, a link to your site may exist but not be found. An excellent means to capture undiscovered links is using Google Analytics to determine the source of any traffic. This method can help you discover links to your site which otherwise were not discovered via a crawler.
If a link does exist but is not captured by OSE and is not sending you any traffic, the link likely has no value at all.
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Looking for a complete list. There has to be a way to see all links pointing to your site...
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in analytics you can actually see the links that send you visitors. You can have a look at them under traffic sources and linking sites. However this is not a complete set of sites linking to you.
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And how do I do this in Analytics?
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Open site expolorer here by seomoz, or you can try open site explorer by yahoo. Here you can find a list of some more if you would like to try multiple ones: http://www.toprankblog.com/2009/11/1-seo-tools-for-tracking-inbound-links/
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Other than Open site Explorer, Google analytic would be your best bet.
Good luck friend
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