Finding Out Who Links To Your Site
Open Site Explorer is a “Link Popularity & Backlink Analysis Tool”, which means it tells you what sites link back to you, and how valuable or popular those sites are. You have to get a pro account to get full data on the value of all your backlinks, but they will show you the links themselves for free.
While you can see who has sent you traffic recently via your referrer logs/site stats/analytics tool, that won’t necessarily show you all the sites that link to you overall. I have a few sites that are older (read:out-of-date) and a lot of the sites that link to them may be a bit dormant, which means they probably won’t all turn up in a given month’s site stats. But Open Site Explorer seems to be keeping track of the big picture.
For example, it shows PNAC.info having 4,825 links to it, which includes all the various pages on all the various sites that have linked to it over the 8 years it’s been up (I’m assuming). By comparison, my relatively-unknown and newer lancebrown.org (this site) shows 605 links altogether (which sounds better than it is; they’re only from 47 “root domains”).
Open Site Explorer seems like a pretty good tool for checking out your site’s overall connectedness on the Web. Do you have other similar tools you can recommend?