There is a no-cost way for you to keep track of who is linking to your pages. If you want your pages to be widely viewed, it might be helpful to see how well the promotion of your pages is working. Keeping track of links to your pages also makes it easier to send out change of address notices should you move your page to a new address. There is also a way to automatically collect the information.

To learn more, click here. Your browser should jump to the middle of a page that shows a number of examples.

But, before you click, here is some background information about how to use the free Alta Vista search engine to find links to your pages:

To find pages that link to yours, browse to Alta Vista and enter the following under "Selection Criteria":

link:"WebAddressOfMyHomePage" AND NOT url:"WebAddressOfMyHomePage"

where WebAddressOfMyHomePage is the address of your home page directory. Don't include the name of the home page--only include the address of the directory in which your web pages are stored. For instance, if your home page address is:

"sunyit.edu/~millerd1/HOMEPAGE.HTM"

leave off the HOMEPAGE.HTM part. Just use:

"sunyit.edu/~millerd1"

(Click here for an example--see the bottom of the resulting example search page.)

Here's basically what the above "Selection Criteria" means:

Give me the addresses of all of the pages known to Alta Vista that link to any of my pages whose address contains "WebAddressOfMyHomePage". (However, do NOT give me the addresses of my pages that do so.)

If all of your pages are located at the same address, the above method should work fine. The second half of the statement prevents Alta Vista from listing your pages even though they my link to other pages of yours. This is useful if you have many such pages and don't want a list of them. Remember, the point of the search is not to find your pages, but rather pages (that you don't already know about) that link to your pages.

Keep in mind that search engines and index sites can be up to several months behind. Others may be up-to-date or only two days behind. Also keep in mind that no search engine is comprehensive.

By the way, if you want to promote your pages, make sure that you submit them to Alta Vista, Excite, Hotbot, and other search engine submission sites. If you think that your pages are pretty interesting, submit them to discriminating sites like Yahoo! There are a number of sites that will help you promote your page--I use Submit It! and others. For a complete list, see the Promotion page of Yahoo.

Good luck! Don't forget to check the search examples.