If you would like to keep track of every website that has linked to you, Google Analytics can help you find a large percentage of URLs with a link to your site.
From your Google Analytics home page click on your website. Then click on “All Referrals” under the Acquisition section on the left sidebar.
This will display a list of the top 10 website domains that are referring traffic to your site in the past month. You can display up to 5,000 rows and extend the date range to when you started your website.
To find the URL of the specific webpage with the link to your site click on the website domain.
This will show you the specific URL on the domain that is referring you traffic. Previously you had to create a custom report in Google Analytics to find the referring page URL.
Now that you have the specific URLs that have a link to your site, you can track them in a spreadsheet like a Google Doc.
This is useful to monitor the growth of your link profile, and it can be encouraging to see new links that you can add to your list. You may want to document your new links in a spreadsheet to monitor things like anchor text distribution and link velocity. You can also use a tool like Raven Tools’ Link Manager to track your links to see if any are removed for some reason. Sometimes link removal is inadvertent (e.g. during a site redesign) and you can contact the webmaster to have the link added back.
If you extend the date range to the beginning of your site, you can find almost every link since someone has probably clicked on the link at some point. If no one has ever clicked on the link, then it is probably not a very good link. If a URL only has one referral since the site launched, it may be a spammy link that you may want to have removed if practical. A downside to this technique for finding links is that some URLs displayed in Google Analytics may be no-follow links such as blog comments.
You can also find links with tools like Google Webmaster Tools, Bing Link Explorer, Open Site Explorer, Ahrefs, and Majestic SEO.
Do you have a tip for finding links to your site? Please share it in the comments.
Charles Sipe is an Online Marketing Specialist in Seattle. You can follow him on Twitter (@charlessipe) or Google+ for interesting marketing links.