This one’s a good one, though I’ll admit my ways of hacking it might not be the easiest… Maybe y’all out there have better answers?
Hey there!
Quick question, do you use wordpress? I do for my blog and none of the incoming links are getting picked up. I had my guy add some sort of plugin in the back end so I can see when someone links to me, but it doesn’t work (as evident by the fact that I just now saw that you linked to me when I read your site, no link came through to me on back end ….sorry for delay in thanking you!)
Anyway, curious how you catch incoming links to your site? I like to thank people in a timely manner when they link to me so my system currently isn’t really working, obvs.
gobble gobble
Can you tell this was over Thanksgiving? ;)
My response: I do use WordPress :) When I log in there’s a section to the right there of my Dashboard that says “incoming links” which I tend to peruse every now and then (I think that’s standard across all WP? If not, it may be part of my theme (Thesis) but I’m pretty sure it’s not…)
What I look at most times though are the pings I get from Google. You can set up alerts with them so whenever someone posts about your site or name (eg. “budgets are sexy” or ” j money”), you’ll automatically receive an email to you with the snippet of the content and link back to it. I set up a handful of these years ago and then had them automatically labeled in my Gmail so I can quickly just go in and check once a day to make sure I’m hitting them all (without them tieing up my emails, not that I get *that* many, haha…). The only real problem with this route is that not everyone uses the terms you’ve set up the alerts for – though you can do plenty of versions if you’d like.
I’m sure there are other things like plugins/etc too that can notify you, but I don’t have any of that set up. Also if you use “Trackbacks” that’s suppose to do the trick too anytime someone links to you (it should come through in the same style as a comment does in your WordPress).
Oh, also, whenever I check my stats (a few times a day – hah!), I always look at the top handful of places people are coming from. When they are other blogs/sites/etc, I can easily just click over and then drop a comment to thank them and what not.. I catch a lot of postings this way, especially the “bigger” ones since they tend to send the most traffic (though I do my best to respond to *all* cuz to me commenting is super important).
Hope this helps And you’re enjoying the last handful of Thanksgiving hours! :)
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[Photo by Forest Service - Northern Region]
{ 7 comments… read them below or add one }
I get pingbacks if someone links to a particular post but that is it. Another way I ntoice is if referral traffic from one site is abnormally large in Google analytics.
yup – pretty much the two ways I find them too :)
hm I will have to check that out. I usually get the ping backs but lately I have noticed alot of them going into the spam filter akismet or however you spell it. So now I have to monitor that.
Right now, my site is so new that I don’t have any sites linking to it.
And the comment thing just recently started, so I totally agree with your sentiments there. :)
@Christopher @ This that and the MBA – Yeah the spam thing is a whole other issue – I literally check mine 3 times a day and scan them just cuz other peoples’ emails usually get tied up in there as well… it’s annoying and takes a few extra seconds to do every day, but on the other hand it’s only a few extra seconds haha… And I’ve found some pretty important stuff in there before!
@Lisa – Well one day you’ll be getting tons of links back, my friend! Just keep on writing (and photo’ing!) your heart out :)
No one has recommended Majestic SEO yet? I use the SEOQuake toolbar which includes a button for Majestic. It gives you a historical survey of backlinks discovery.
Interesting… putting it on my list to check out, thx man!