Getting a complete list of all incoming links

[JeanYates]

I'm trying to clean up my spam incoming links and can't find where to download a complete list. Google Webmaster Tools has a button to download "Sample Links" or "Latest Links" but they don't show them all.

Looking for wisdom from all the gurus out there.

Thanks,

Jean

[MarieHaynes]

Unfortunately neither OSE nor the link: command will give you a complete list of your links.  I have had some sites where the list from WMT is 10x as many links as shown in OSE.

Here is how you get a list of links from WMT:

Click on Traffic, then "Links to your site".  Then click on Download latest links.  (see image below).

I have found that this gives a very full list.

Now, some will tell you that you will need to merge the list of links from WMT with ones you can get from OSE, ahrefs and Majestic. If you have less than 1000 links then I wouldn't worry about this.

If you did have a LOT of links to your site then I would probably use ahrefs to get a list and combine it with the one that WMT gives you.

A word of caution:  You can easily shoot yourself in the foot by trying to clean up a link profile because you can end up removing links that are actually good links.  I would not recommend doing this unless you have a warning of unnatural links in your WMT.  If you feel that you have been affected by Penguin, then removing spammy links could help but at this point we haven't seen a whole lot of credible cases of recovery.  So, be careful!

downloadlatestlinks1.png

[goodlegaladvice]

Webmaster Tools Latest Links goes back a couple years...  should give u an idea of what's bad..  But that complete list no one has

[ncrmarketing]

I'd use http://www.opensiteexplorer.com, but you can also Google "link:youdomain.com" and get them in a SERP.

In Open Site Explorer, you can also sort/filter the list to find the less reputable sites linking to you and target them for evaluation first which is handy if you have hundreds of links to review.

Vic

[malecce]

Open site explorer of Seomoz

http://www.opensiteexplorer.org

Bye

Maurizio