Find Who is Linking to your Website with Google Analytics ~ Aptitudesquestions

Wednesday, September 26, 2012

Find Who is Linking to your Website with Google Analytics

9/26/2012 07:53:00 PM

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The organic search rankings (and Google PageRank) of your web pages depend on several factors but the most crucial one is incoming links (also known as backlinks). Search engines treat external links pointing to your website as “votes” and more votes will often translate into higher search rankings.

Find Sites That Are Linking To You

Would you like to know which websites are linking to any of your web pages? Or how many incoming links (or backlinks) have you “earned” since yesterday? Here’s how you use use Google Analytics to find out who’s linking to you.

Step 1: Sign-in to your Google Analytics Account and open the “Standard Reporting” dashboard for any of your Analytics profiles.

Step 2: Click the Traffic Sources group in the left sidebar followed by Social – > Pages.

Step 3: The next screen of Google Analytics will have a list of the most popular web pages on your site (sorted by traffic). Click on any of these pages to view its incoming links report.

Step 4: Google Analytics will open the Social Referrals report for that page. We need to switch to the Activity Stream tab as shown in the next screenshot.

Step 5: On the Activity Stream page, switch to the Events tab (next to Conversations) and then click on any of the “green” Trackback icons (they also have permalinks) to get a list of all external website that are linking to that particular page.

Step 6: This is the last step. Select any of the Trackbacks on the page, choose the down arrow and select “View Activity” to know the exact page URL that is linking to your website.

Tracking Backlinks – Bonus Tips

It may take a few steps to access these TrackBacks report the first time but you can add it as a widget to your Google Analytics dashboard for quick access anytime later (look for the “Add to Dashboard” button at the top of the page).
These reports display backlinks per page but if you would like to see the backlinks of your entire website, go to the top of the report and “Click All” to remove the Page filter.
If you would like to know how many new sites have linked to your websites in the last day, just go to the Date Range and change it to “Yesterday” or you can even choose custom dates.