Track Your Link Campaign Progress

As you manage your inbound link campaign, keep track of the number of links pointing to your website versus the progress of your allies and opponents.

Since search engines measure and report links differently, stick with just one for the purpose of comparison. For the most realistic link counts, I recommend Yahoo.

To measure link popularity, type the following into Yahoo's search box:

link:redcross.org (substitute "redcross.org" with whatever site you're measuring)

Alternatively, there are several free tools available to measure link popularity:

For any webpage, ToolURL reports the number of inbound referral links (they call them backlinks) that are influencing rankings at Google, Yahoo, MSN, AlltheWeb, and AltaVista: http://toolurl.com/back-links/linkanalyser.php
Marketleap reports the number of inbound referral links from Google, Yahoo, and MSN, overlayed with comparisons to the link popularity of similar websites. http://marketleap.com/publinkpop
URLTrends reveals historical link popularity trends and social bookmarking trends. URLTrends tracks and reports historical link popularity data from Google, Alexa, Yahoo, MSN, AlltheWeb, Altavista, Teoma, IceRocket, Furl, and Del.icio.us: http://urltrends.com

Avoid Buying Text Links

Self Assessment