Webmasters pay a lot of unnecessary attention to the site, worrying about things like meta tags, keyword density (actually a myth), article titles. But everything takes a back seat when it comes to references.

Most practitioners of SEOs spend their days enthusiastically studying communication and engaged in building a reference mass. But many site owners completely ignore the links or maximum, pay them little attention. The reason for this is quite obvious: if the site itself, its content, design, visitors, you can "feel", links are somewhat vague concept that can not be viewed without special tools.

Monitor links

First, do not use the Google operator link: to check links. It is highly inaccurate.

The tools provide a huge amount of information that Google know about the site. Although the accuracy and veracity of the information provided there is often questioned, it is an invaluable tool for webmasters.

There are two main indicators: the number of links to the site and the number of domains that link to the site. Both of these pieces of information are available in Google and Yandex.

The number of links will almost always be higher than the number of domains, and there will often be more than one link from a site that links to yours. Two links are better than one, and two links from two different domains are even better.

But Google shows only "Domains, which often refer to the pages of your website", and Yandex "approximately", which is not enough.

Independent means to monitor external links

For a long time, and now , many used, but unfortunately soon the freebie will end, Yahoo closes the service.

If you check the site with the help of these services, the results will be different from the indicators in the panels of webmasters Google and Yandex, and among themselves.

All spiders of services, creep on a network, but all of them work differently and therefore find various references. By collecting links, they then clean the lists, removing those they think are spam or unimportant. Unfortunately, they all have different criteria for making these decisions.

Although most of the complex Analytics on these services are paid, basic information about backlinks is available without payment.

What do the numbers say?

Now there are four sets (SEOmoz, Majestic, Google, Yandex) of two numbers (total backlinks and referring domains) for your website, and most likely, they differ from each other. Most importantly, we must understand that none of them is "right". Even Yahoo did not give complete information.

It is important to keep this data in perspective: how it changes, i.e. whether the number of backlinks is increasing or not. It is necessary to track the change, for example, to have a sign where each month to record the figures obtained and observe the trend of change in the reference mass to the site.