Ask HN: Tools to check for check for incoming links?

3 points·ColinWright··4 comments

I have a few web pages that I'm looking to remove, but I don't want to "break the web". I've been trying to see if there are any pages out there in the wild that point in to the pages in question, but have had very little success.

What tools do you guys use to find pages that point to your sites?

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http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/

That's where I'd go. Just pop in your domain and it should list links to you. As a "pro" member you can better group the searches by "ranking" (a good measure of how much that link is seen), or domain, meaning all sites hosted at one site would be grouped making browsing the list easier.

/edit: Sadly, the cut-off is rather high for free use, though. I hadn't realized that, and only just now checked.

Google webmaster tools is helpful. You'll see errors when google bot tries to crawl a page that doesn't exist (for example, because you deleted it and there is a link to it somewhere). Keep an eye on it, and it will help point out problems. It also provides a partial list of incoming links to start with - as good or better than any other free tool I'm aware of.

Your access logs. Extract the referrers from last 12 month and you have a pretty good list.

I tried that - quite a lot of the accesses don't have referrers listed, which surprised me. That's why I wondered about tools to go find the incoming links to see if I could cross-correlated them in any way, or even just find them.

So thanks, and that's useful and important, but I'm still looking for other ideas and/or tools.

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