Who’s Linking to Your Site? - Information Trapping: Real-Time Research on the Web - page 93

To get a timely sense of who's linking to your site, you want to check RSS
feed search engines that can sort their results by date.
Trapping Links in RSS Feeds
Trapping links from RSS feeds has one massive advantage: the feeds can be
sorted by date. You know when you get a new hit that it will be fresh; it won't
be something that's been wandering around a search engine index for the
last few years. And because most RSS feeds are oriented toward blogs, you
also know your results will be mostly commentary. hat's all good.
You have two major options when you want to check for links in RSS feeds.
Both Technorati and IceRocket ofer link searches.
technorati
In Technorati's (technorati.com) early days, I spent a lot of time using it to
check links. Nowadays, Technorati does a decent job of searching for tags
and keywords. But it's even better at checking for links to sites, which is
mostly what I use it for.
You don't need to use any syntax to check for links; just enter the URL that
you want to monitor in the Website URL Search form. You will get a list of
all pages which link to that domain or URL, with the most recent links at
the top ( Figure 6.2 ).
Luckily Technorati doesn't care if you use http:// with the URL. It displays
a list of the blogs that link to that URL or a URL in that domain, with the
most recent ones listed irst.
You also have the option to “claim” your site. Claiming your site means that
you prove to Technorati that you own your domain (this usually involves
pasting a little snippet of code on your site). Once you've done that, you
have the option of adding some additional information about your blog to
Technorati and getting some information on your Technorati account page
about the popularity and number of links to your site.
I ind that sometimes Technorati delivers a false positive on a site that is on a
link list, but is not part of an active Weblog discussion. On the other hand, it
will sometimes ind results that I didn't see on IceRocket.