Inlinks (or backlinks) are the incoming hyperlinks that can direct traffic to a website or blog. Inlinks are often used by web designers and developers as an indicator of the popularity or importance of a web page. By using Yahoo Site Explorer you can see how many hyperlinks are coming in to your site or a competitor’s site.

Go to http://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com

Enter the name of the site you would like to check and then click Explore URL. In this example I am going to use the Acoustic Guitar Player site run by Tony Hogan http://the-guitarplayer.com/

This will take you to a page showing you the number of pages on the site. You need to click on the inlinks button to see the links in to the site.

This will take you to a page that shows all links in to the site including any links that are happening within the site. To see only the links that are coming in from outside sites you will need to click on the Show Inlinks drop-down box and select Except from this domain

Then click on the next drop-down box and select Entire Site

 You can now see that this site has 3650 sites that link back to http://the-guitarplayer.com/. If you want to have a look at any of these that have hyperlink in to this sites you can just click on the Explore button.