Quick Tip: Tracking who links to you

Written on July 30, 2006 // Miscellaneous 6 Comments

Here’s a quick tip before I go to bed. If you want to track who’s storing a page from your site in their bookmarks, here are a couple of ways to do that.

Inma.gnolia, simply use this rss feed, changing the domain to your own. http://ma.gnolia.com/rss/full/terms/nataliejost.com

Fordel.icio.us go to “del.icio.us/url](http://del.icio.us/url/ and search for your domain. Then at the bottom of the page you’ll see an rss feed icon. There you’ll find the feed for the search page.

With each of these, you’ll get updated each time someone bookmarks you. HOWEVER, I believe del.icio.us only does a search for a single url, whereas ma.gnolia searches for the occurrence of the text of your url within a link, so any url that begins with your domain will be found. In other words, ma.gnolia will find nataliejost.com and nataliejost.com/blog/quick-tip-tracking-who-links-to-you together in the same feed, but del.icio.us will only find nataliejost.com OR nataliejost.com/blog/quick-tip-tracking-who-links-to-you in a separate search – with a separate feed.

You can do a regular search in del.icio.us using this link http://del.icio.us/search/?all=example.com but I didn’t see a feed for the results on that page and it appears it only includes a total of occurrences, not each one as they happen.

I know withTechnorati this is about the same as with del.icio.us. You can see all the links on the site, but I haven’t found a feed for it yet. Anyone else have any ideas? Other services that provide a feature for this?


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6 Comments

  1. Nick Cowie July 31, 2006 | 4:39am

    If you sign up with technorati, you can add your URL to “Your Watchlist” and there is an RSS feed.

    Unfortunately the past few months it has been rather inaccurate for me with regards the URL and RSS feed. On the technorati site the URL information is spot on, other RSS feeds from technorati are fine, it is just the URL + RSS that spits out wrong information.


  2. Horst Gutmann July 31, 2006 | 8:05am

    You could also use Technorati’s API as some kind of starting point. Perhaps this is useful as a starting point (was too long to post as comment) :)


  3. Natalie Jost July 31, 2006 | 8:09am

    Thanks, Nick! And Horst, that’s some awesome work there, and if I had any idea what to do with it, I’d be in heaven, I’m sure! I’m just a lowly designer though, all I know are making things look pretty. :) Seriously, though, that took some real work looking at it through these designer eyes, so thank you. I’m sure there are some real techies following this that could really do something with that!


  4. Horst Gutmann July 31, 2006 | 9:31am

    I wish I could at least do some really low level design, all I know is coding. So in this sense I’m just a lowly coder ;-) Sorry, I probably misunderstood what you were looking for. I thought you wanted to get some kind of link cosmos for your website and an actual (RSS/Atom/Whatever) feed. Just noticed this after re-reading your post :-)


  5. Natalie Jost July 31, 2006 | 10:23am

    No, you’re fine! It’s some great information for when I do get that far (if my left brain can get a hand over the right for awhile). :) It’s people like you that keep me on my toes and it’s definitely good info for others who know what to do with it, so I’m not at all discouraging you from sharing. On the contrary, I appreciate it!


  6. Otis Gospodnetic July 31, 2006 | 1:39pm

    You can also do this with Simpy, which uses the common “site” operator like Google, Yahoo, etc.:

    http://simpy.com/rss/links/search/site:nataliejost.com

    This will find people who bookmarked any of your pages, regardless of whether they used “www.”….. or not.

    And while we are on the subject of tracking, with Simpy you can also track/discover other things. For example, new video clips:

    http://simpy.com/rss/links/search/ext:mov+OR+ext:wmv+OR+ext:mpg+OR+ext:mpeg

    Or, if you want only the videos that are really newly bookmarked, just add usercount:1 to the query part:

    http://simpy.com/rss/links/search/usercount:1+AND+(ext:mov+OR+ext:wmv+OR+ext:mpg+OR+ext:mpeg)

    Enjoy!