@TiGGiMar 14.2006 — #There's no way to do it, what you can track is how many visitors you get by user clicking links on other sites. Most of the host companies provide you with stats of your site. You would find it under "Refferer Domains"
As for this being the right place to post not really you should have asked in the search engine forum as this is a thing the people do when doing SEO work.
That dont tell you how many people are linking to you though.
And Google is the worst one to check cos that only picks up a sample of your inbound links and only updates the inbound links every 3 months same time as the PR updates.
Using the same method in MSN is usually better as the tend to pick up the most amount of inbound links, but if you use that tool I gave a link for it does that check on Google, Yahoo, MSN, AllTheWeb, AltaVista and HotBot/Inktomi.
They do say what sites you have had traffic from so as long as people come from the site who links to you then it will pick it up.
Though awstats is exellent for web stats and highly recommenable, it is very very useful to find where your visitors are coming from and what they do when they are there.
The link popularty checks are limited though aswell like pcthug says.
They will only pick up inbound links what the search engines know are linking to your site. If the search engine dont know about the link then it wont show in the results.
@pcthugMar 15.2006 — #Google is very accurate in showing which sites link to your site, using the [B]link:[/B] query will return an array of what google deems to be; the top ~80% of inbound links. Those ~80% inbound links will be responsible for about 98% of all inbound links, therefore it can be a very useful tool for determining where the majority of your inboud link traffic is coming from.
Awstats offers many features, one of those being it's ability to track which sites your traffic is coming from (or sites that link to you.)
@johnevaMar 15.2006 — #Yeah thats what I said about awstats.
But doing that search in Google does not show "the top 80% inbound links will be responsible for about 98% of all inbound links".
Cos it only shows 957 for my site and most of them are my own pages. Google never shows all your links ever.
Where as I know for a fact there is far far more than that, MSN comes up with over 5500 inbound links.
Like I say using that tool I posted link for does exactly that anyways it just asks each search engine what links they know about. Asking 6 diffrent search engine has to be better than just asking 1 does it not?
EDIT
Infact looking at it all them 957 links are my own pages if you use inurl:lease-hire.co.uk
I know about the link: already but knowing you are so much more experianced than me, I was not going to argue about using the inurl: to search as I had never used it till just.
That tool if you use it uses the link: to get its results.
If you run a search then click on the figure for one of the search engines it takes you to the search engine with the results of all the links the same as if you just go to the search engine and use the link:
and yeah I know that google are the most fussy about links but they also dont update there backlinks very often they only update the amount of backlinks every 3 months the same as the PR updates.
My backlinks carnt be that bad anyways look at my SERP's in all search engines. Well yahoo we dont do to well only just on the frist page for the top keywords. ?
If it has the nofollow or a robots.txt saying not to scan that page then no search engine shows the back link when you check by using the link: and the link is usless anyways, except for traffic and most backlinks are usless for traffic.
The only backlinks we got that gives us a desent amount of traffic are auto trader and contract hire and leasing both of which are paid advertising.
EDIT
oh yeah and the question was "How can I check who and how many other sites have a link to my homepage?"
@Robert_WellockMar 16.2006 — #I mainly just look at the raw server logs it amusing watching the daily Script Kiddie attacks that always fail. Though I really should stop those hotlinkers, I get far to many of those from forums stealing my images.