If you want to get found on search engines you need people to link to your site. But sometimes links to your site can actually cause your search engine ranking to fall. This usually happens because Google had determined a site linking to yours is affiliated with something Google considers to be bad practice. If you have some of these links it can pay to remove them. So the question becomes "How to find who is linking to your site?". In this article I'm going to show you where you can go to check who is linking to your site for free.

To find who is linking to your site go to SEOMoz.org. SEOMoz makes tools to help your search engine optimization. Once you're on their site go to the resources tab and choose SEO Tools. Click on the link that says "Open Site Explorer" under the Link Analysis section. It's on the top row of tools all the way over to the right side of the page. Once you launch Site Explorer you'll need to enter your domain name into the field provided. Site Explorer will provide you with some helpful information about your site but for the sake of finding who is linking to your site click on the Linking Domains tab. You'll now be able to see a list of top level domain names that are linking to your site.

You can also see who is linking to your site by Anchor Text. Anchor text are the keywords that are included in the links that come back to your site. Generally speaking if you have a lot of a certain keyword in your anchor text you should be ranking pretty high for that keyword unless it's a super broad or competitive term. If you want to see where each of the anchor text links to your site are coming from click on the small plus icon below each keyword. You will then be able to see a list of where all the links are coming from to your site. Here you can really examine these keywords and determine whether the inbound links are the type of links you want coming to your site.

Now that you know who is linking to you you'll need to understand whether or not their a quality link. For the most part Google likes a lot of relevant links and looks down on website that trade links or link farms. You'll definitely want to contact site owners who are linking to you if they're participating in link exchanges or links farms. Having good quality links from good neighborhoods across the web is critical to getting the best possible search engine ranking.