The number of relevant backlinks to your site directly impacts both your search engine ranking (keyword searches) and your PR (page rank).

It's easy to find out how many backlinks there are to your site (and where they're coming from):

For Google (keep in mind Google doesn't count ALL of your individual backlinks - for instance, if I have a link at the bottom of every page of a 2,000 page website, it only counts what it considers to be the 'most important' of those 2,000 pages - so their numbers are a bit skewed. Still, since Google is regarded (at least by itself ) as the be-all and end-all of search engines, it's important to know which links they're counting for your site)
Go to www.google.com and enter the following text in the search box field:
link:www.whateverwebsiteyou're checking.com
You'll get the total number of links back to your site and a listing of where they're originating from.

For Yahoo! (Yahoo! DOES count *all* pages that you're linked back to from, so their numbers are much higher than Google's)
Go to www.yahoo.com and enter the following text in the search box field:
link:www.whateverwebsiteyou're checking.com

For MSN go to www.live.com and enter the same text as for the other two.

interesting... there are quite a few sites where I know my Website is linked from that are not listed here. I guess that means google just hasn't found the links yet... Thanks for this great info Tess!

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Sally Kuhlman
Virtual Simplicity blog

Thanks for the info. I was surprised at how many more links my blog site had then my VA site. I also would have thought I had a lot more links.

A few reasons why your totals may not match with what you were expecting:
Google calculates links only every three months and won't give credit for a link until it's been active for some time.
Also, even if you have a sitewide link on X number of pages of a domain, Google only counts a few of them at best - not all.

Interesting, I did this check and got the following results

Live Search = 0
Yahoo = 120
Google = 4

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Julia

Hi Julia, please double check the instructions above and make sure you entered the info exactly as noted - according to my result you have 124 links calculated by Yahoo.

I use the following link http://seopro.com.au/free-seo-tools/link-checker/ , which gives me all the info I require about backlinks, no follow, anchor, link counts and home page PR.
Isaac