See who is linking to you

Originally posted · 2 min read

Google’s Webmaster Tools site provides a reporting feature to let you see who is linking to you. Unfortunately, the report is backwards from the orientation I want to read it. It lists the remote links for each of your local pages. I want to see all of the local pages linked on a remote site grouped together. That helps me recognize trends and identify people who might be blogging about what I write here.

Luckily, in addition to the interactive report on the tools web site, you can download the data in a CSV file to be manipulated in any way you want. I put together a little script to produce an HTML file which shows what sites link to me, and the target links on my site. For example, I was a bit surprised to discover several links on an [STRIKEOUT:Italian] Israeli site. Here’s a segment of the output of LinkingToMe:

There are a lot of links on del.icio.us to the PyMOTW articles, and while that’s cool it isn’t very useful in this report. I included an option to filter out sites by their hostname, and included several bookmarking sites as defaults.

So far I’m not doing any other processing on the data (such as downloading the titles on those remote pages). Perhaps when I have a little more time I’ll enhance the script.

[Corrected country of origin for whatsup.co.il.]