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While there is plenty of variables in Google’s algorithm backlinks are well known to help your site rank in the search engine results. It is not only the number of links you have, but the quality of the links, as well a the anchor text you use in those links.

All the elements can get pretty overwhelming, but let’s just look at how many links you have and how to check.

You will have to use Yahoo to do this, as Google will never give you an actual measure of how many links you have pointing to your site. It will give you a sampling of the sites linking to your site. So we head over to Yahoo, who doesn’t seem to have this problem.

We’re not going straight to Yahoo search, but to the site explorer. Here’s the link:

https://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/

Once you’re there you will put your url in the search box ~ or the site url you want to check backlinks for.

Site explorer will first show you the number of pages on the site ~ that’s not what you want. You want the links pointing to the site, so you’ll click the “inlinks” button. This will give you all the links pointing to your site, including links from your own site. While these count it is more accurate and helpful to look at the links you have pointing to your site from other sites.

Getting this piece of information is simple enough by clicking “except from this domain”. This will remove all the internal site links.

This will give you a list and number of backlinks you have pointing to your site.

Once you know this information you can use this process to check the backlinks of other sites trying to rank for the keywords you are targeting. You may find they have more or less backlinks than your site has and they may or may not be currently outranking you in Google.

This can be caused by several reasons. You may have all your links coming from a few sites. This happens when you comment on all the same blogs all the time, or if you submit all your posts to the same bookmarking sites. Variety is better.

The other reason sites with less backlinks than you may be outranking you may be because of the quality of the links they have. They may be using the specific keywords as the anchor text in more of their links. Their links may be coming from more relevant sites, or sites with better page rank. No matter the reason though, you know where you’re at, and you can keep building more quality links from quality sites and know that you will eventually overtake them in the ranking.