Facibus On Blogging

Inbound links are the lifeblood of ranking systems like Technorati and Google. All other things being equal, a blog with more people talking about it will have a higher rank than an otherwise equal blog that hasn’t. Inbound links are a very good thing (as long as they are quality links - linking deep inside your blog structure and coming from sites with a higher rather than lower ranking themselves).

Here’s a thing: I’m profiling a different Australian blog as my contribution to NaBloPoMo this month.

Most people have responded with a comment thanking me for mentioning their blog. Some haven’t. That is perfectly OK. But it does raise the question - how do they know if there is an inbound link? That is, how do they know that I’ve mentioned them (or that anyone else has, for that matter)?

Self-hosted WordPress (also known as WordPress Multi-User or MU) sends me an email every time I get a pingback - that is, I know when someone has linked to a specific posting. But this doesn’t apply to links to the base URL of the blog - http://facibus.com/onblogging rather than http://facibus.com/onblogging/2007/11/13/throw-away-your-television-and-blog/ - and this is an issue if I am relying on the system to let me know when someone has linked to my blog in general.

I know that Quick Blog also sends an email to notify that comments are waiting for approval - but not pingbacks - so I can’t rely on the system.

I can go to the dashboard of my WordPress blogs and look on the right hand side - it shows incoming links:

If I click on the More link it takes me through to what technorati has to say:

 From this, I can see which posts actually referred to Facibus On Blogging. The fact that most of them are from blogrolls gives me cause for concern - it means that my recent posting slump has really affected not only my reader numbers but the number of people who are prepared to link to this blog - not good. I have some work to do to recover the lost ground.

I could have just as easily gone to Technorati and looked up reactions to my own blog by searching on it.

The other way is to use Google’s link: option - just type link:http:/your-url-here.com and see what comes up. The issue with doing it this way is that Google gives link: results for a specific URL.

There are WordPress plugins like TrackBackers that actively display inbound links - the only thing that worries me is that it might display spam links as well as the quality ones.

Do you have a favourite way of detecting inbound links that I’ve missed here?