Tracking Incoming Links

As we’ve discussed at length, here in the WebWarriors, incoming links are important to increasing “page rank,” in the search engines, especially Google, thus moving our stories closer to the top of search engine results.

But how do we track those incoming links?

A couple of years ago, Technorati was the ultimate blog search engine. Over the last several months, however, Technorati has been diminishing in value for tracking incoming links for bloggers. It only counts links from certain sources (usually only blogs indexed by Technorati), and only for the last six months, whereas the other search engine crawlers are a lot more extensive.

I’ve been experimenting with Domain-Pop.com, and so far, I like it. It provides a comprehensive breakdown, by domain, of links back to a specified domain, and a total of the number of currently-indexed domains, urls, and IP’s are linking back to a url (the stats appear to show all currently active links, regardless of post-date). It also provides information on how many indexed links and websites Google and Yahoo (not Bing, unfortunately) are counting. The developers are still working on the site, but I’m very impressed with what they’ve come up with so far.

Have you found a great back-link checker? Please share.