Get a list of backlinks to a url

[paulf]

Hi,

I just wondered, is it possible to get a list of backlinks to a specific url using the indexing desktop software? The spider must be building up that information while it's crawling the site but I can't see anywhere to get at it. I don't think the log file shows it.

Would be useful to know so that if there's, say, a page you want to delete, you can find out which pages link to it and so change those first. I'm currently on version 5.1 (build: 1014)

Paul

[David]

Most of the info is in the log. Especially if you turn on debug mode.
But to index a page the indexer only needs to find one incoming link. It doesn't need to maintain a list of all incoming links in order to find the pages.

[paulf]

Thanks for your quick reply. I know the indexer only needs to crawl the page once but it must be finding the same link in other pages and then choosing to ignore it if it's already been indexed so I just wondered whether it was building a list of all the pages it finds each link on.

Not to worry - would be quite a useful feature though to help find potential SEO issues on a site. E.g. if your home page is /index.php and you have links both to www.domain.com and www.domain.com/index.php, they're obviously both the same page but treated as separate pages by Google etc so better to only have links to www.domain.com. Looking at a list of backlinks for /index.php would tell you which pages you need to change the links on. If you see what I mean!

I appreciate it's not quite the intended purpose of the software but useful none the less!

[David]

For the example you listed you can look in the Zoom log to see what page linked to the index.php page. But you'll only get 1 linked page at a time.

But even easier is to just grep your code for "index.php"

[Johnpaul1]

Checking backlinks

well, alternatively for checking Back links you can download Google toolbar for page rank and after installing you will get button for page rank . When you will click on page rank button. You will get another option by name BACK LINK. By clicking on that button you can find back link for a particular URL.


Regards
John Paul

[David]

Doesn't work if your site hasn't been indexed by Google, and even if it has been Google doesn't maintain a full list of back links.