This means that in just an instant, you can look at any webpage and determine whether or not it’s worth pursuing a link based on the number of links on the page. Using SEOdigger, you can easily see the quantity and which phrases any domain is ranking for on it Google and MSN. I’m not sure why it doesn’t work for Yahoo, but maybe it will soon.

When you’re only talking about a dozen or so links, it’s easy enough to count manually, but when you start getting up into the higher numbers, it can be a futile exercise to try and count the number of links.

You may be thinking that if you’re having trouble counting them it’s probably not worth pursuing, however if it’s a higher PR page, then even a page with 100 or more links can have some good value. If you use Firefox (and you should) then you really need to be using this free SEO extension.

There are a number of informational sites, you can choose from, but I just ran across a great site for first glance information. The information is coming from the US Census data, which is getting old, but it is still pretty decent.

The site is called zip skinny, and here are your detailed instructions…

Type in a zipcode – Nice!

Not to mention the fact that there seem to be new tools available every month, and various reporting services “update” their procedures, so it’s getting hard to know the who, what, when and how of services and tools that are reporting links.

Use Yahoo for this, and you supposedly get all of the links Yahoo knows about excluding those from your own domain -
linkdomain:www.domain.com -site:www.domain.com

You may also search without the www and see different numbers
linkdomain:domain.com -site:domain.com

The fact that www and non www numbers are different is not something to fret over, but it is something to decide for yourself, then use a consistent standard, and stick with it.

To avoid driving yourself crazy, decide to track only one of them month-to-month, (like www) and focus any link building efforts on www. versions as well

Then there’s Yahoo Site Explorer, which in most cases will support higher numbers, and give it a more in-depth analysis. This is my preferred method.

“Exploring” a URL there gives several different results. First, there are two options at the top, “Pages” and “Inlinks”

“Pages” lists the index pages in the search engine from your domain, but Inlinks is where it can get confusing.

For Inlinks you have three options to show links:
1. From All Pages (which is supposed to include those from your own domain)
2. Except from this Domain (this is supposed to exclude all links originating from your domain name)
3. Except From this Subdomain (used only if you are working with a subdomain on your site)

Then you have two more options for each of your previous choices:
1. to “Entire Site”
2. to “Only this URL” (For checking the inlink counts of specific pages)

Occasionally, when reviewing the options, and they don’t appear to change, and you have to re-select your choices. It’s always worked a bit buggy like this for me, even on different computers.

Another problem you may notice is that you can never quite duplicate, or even come very close to the same amount of inlinks shown at http://search.yahoo.com/search with the command linkdomain:www.domain.com -site:www.domain.com

Why? What is the difference between linkdomain:www.domain.com -site:www.domain.com at Yahoo, and “Show Inlinks Except from this Domain” to “Entire Site” at Yahoo site Explorer?

The count is always substantially different. Is this because it’s using different databases? Different data centers? That makes no sense because they are eternally and completely unmatched.

Most experts seem to agree that using Site Explorer is a more accurate representation, but I want to know why… What’s the difference? What’s your opinion?

Will it go up? Will go down? That’s up to you, and it depends on your feedback, and the volume of orders we receive.

A couple of updates:
We are considering offering the keyword research report free if both of the competitive analysis reports are ordered. that will likely be in place today.