Counting backlinks to your internet home
26th August 2006
Sooner or later, you will be interested in how many sites link back to yours, be it a blog or a web-site.
To know for myself, I first used Technorati’s code, which displayed Technorati logo with a ‘Blogs that link here’ link, which opened Technorati search for backlinks. Drawbacks of this solution: you need to leave the blog to see the backlinks count, only backlinking blogs are taken into account, the JavaScript used by Technorati is no good for the blog page loading speed, you have no easily accessible history of backlinks.
All of these problems are solved in the backlinks WordPress plugin. Installation is easy, just a bit complicated by the need to get ‘application ID’ from MSN’s developer site.
Update: some time ago the backlinks plugin ceased functioning, and the plugin’s author seems to have abandoned development and support. Thus I disabled this plugin.