SSC Toolbox Social Source Commons Blog

Nonprofit Tech, Tools and Social Media

A program of Aspiration 
Aspiration 

Discover Who’s Linking To Your Site

Being the social media geek that I am, I sometimes forget not everyone knows the little tips that have become second-nature to me when I set up RSS feeds to search for social media mentions of our organization. Leading a Building a Social Media Dashboard seminar last week at the SFNTC, I found that a lot of people didn’t know that you can search for people linking to your website.

Searching for Links in Google

Google has all of these little commands that are basically words that you type that make your search results more specific. One of these commands allows you to search for pages linking to your site. This means that you can search for links to your different web properties in a Google Alert or Google Blogsearch and pull it into your dashboard via RSS.

link:url.org

To make that magic happen, you need to use the Google search convention link:organization.org in the Google search bar. “link:” before a URL searches the internet for links that point to that URL. For instance, if I search for link:blog.socialsourcecommons.org, the search results that show up are webpages that have a link to blog.socialsourcecommons.org no matter what the link text.

Try it out on Google Blogsearch!

  • Go to http://blogsearch.google.com
  • Type in link:yourorganization.org and hit return
  • On the search results page, at the bottom, click on the link to “RSS” and BAM you’ve got a feed you can pull into your dashboard.

Who’s Shortening Your URLs on Twitter?

Wait. What exactly is a URL Shortener…?

A URL Shortener takes a long link and creates a forwarder that is much shorter. You can then use the forwarder just like you would the long link and save tons of space. Think Weight Watchers but for URLs.

http://maps.google.com/?ie=UTF8&hq=&hnear=40+Steiner +St,+San+Francisco,+California +94117&ll=37.757687,-122.442627&spn=0.15336, 0.296974&z=12

=
http://bit.ly/bVHZLX

URL shorteners are a great invention in the age of 140 character limits, but when listening for your organization on the internet how do you know when that bit.ly link points to your website? Luckily http://search.twitter.com now supports search terms that are shortened URLs. “What does this mean,” you ask? This means that you can go to http://search.twitter.com, search for your URL and it will show you results with shortened URLs that point to your real URL.

Try it out on Twitter Search!

  • Go to http://search.twitter.com
  • Type in yourorganization.org and hit return
  • On the search results page, on the right sidebar, click on the link to “RSS” and BAM you’ve got a feed you can pull into your dashboard.


How Do You Find Out When People are Linking To Your Site?




1 Comment to Discover Who’s Linking To Your Site

  1. February 26, 2011 at 9:37 am | Permalink

    According to this post is good for me.Because it shows me that how find out other peoples those are linking to my site.And your blog is good.So i will try to find out links related to your question.

Connect with SSC


RSS Feed  Twitter  Facebook

Aspiration Publications