Find out who links to your website. Find out all the external links to a domain.

Find out who links to your website

You can use the power of the search engines to find out who has links pointing to your site or to any domain for that matter.

In Google the syntax is allinanchor:domain.name. For example you would put this in the search box:

allinanchor:dimitar.me

to find out all the external links to this site.

In Yahoo and Altavista the syntax is linkdomain:domain.name. For example:

linkdomain:dimitar.me

Besides being useful to find out the popularity of your site, this technique could also be used to find out more information about anyone or anything.

It will allow you to find out who has links to the person in question on their blogs and social networking sites… Also it will show you things like the profiles they had created in different forums for instance (if they had put a link to their site in the profile description of course). There are a lot of possibilities here… Give it a try for yourselves.

Thursday, September 10th, 2009 IT Security

4 Comments to Find out who links to your website

Hi Dimitar, Nice tip! For some reason it doesn’t work for my blogspot blog. Any ideas??

Tim on September 16th, 2009

Hi Tim,

obscuredclarity.blogspot.com is a second level domain. The main domain for your blog is blogspot.com. They have thousands of second level domains for each of their users like- xyz.blogspot.com. I have never tried to do a link search on a second level domain. It turns out it is a bit more tricky. What happens is that allinanchor will match any of the words in the provided string. Since you have a second level domain it would look for any link containing either obscuredclarity or blogspot and understandably you will get tons of false positives.
What you can do is search for a link containing only obscuredclarity (allinanchor:obscuredclarity). This will give you all the pages having links containing “obscuredclarity” in their “href” tag. A search like that will return pages like http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wA7q9FaD0XE where there is a link to http://www.youtube.com/user/ObscuredClarity. So even though this could be useful it is not exactly what you needed.
The other thing you can do is use the “link” search operator instead of the “allinanchor” with your full second.first lever domain (link:obscuredclarity.blogspot.com). The limitation on this is that it will only give you pages that contain links to your home page. Links that go to any other page on your blog will not be indexed. For example a link to http://www.obscuredclarity.blogspot.com/xyz.php will not come back in the results.