What’s the preferred way to check for links to my site?

What’s the preferred way to check for links to my site? - answered by Matt Cutts

Matt's answer:

CUTTS: Okay. Murph from Baltimore, Maryland asks, “Seeing as how the “link:” search query is hardly ever accurate, what would your preferred or favorite way to check for inbound links if you were a webmaster?” Well, I’ve explained this before but the “link:” operator is accurate. It only shows you a subsample of your links. So my preferred way would be to log-in to Google’s Webmaster Tools and we will show you a very exhaustive list of all your back links, pretty much all the back links that we know of in Google’s Webmaster console. The nice thing is other people can’t spy on that, so your competitor can’t look at your back links. You can start to see some back links for other sites, Yahoo! Site Explorer, for example. If you type in a URL into Yahoo! Site Explorer, just their search box, you can explore back links a little bit that way. So those are couple tools that you can use. But, again, it’s not the “link:” isn’t, you know, it’s not that we show wrong links. It’s just that we don’t show all of the links that we know of. So there’s a lot of different options that you have to find out more about back links for different websites.

by Matt Cutts - Google's Head of Search Quality Team

 

Original video: