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Find Missing Links
How To Search For Hyperlinks To Your Internet Site
by Kurt E. DeSoto
IS personnel have a number of software tools to reveal information about the visitors to their company's or firm's websites. These tools can unearth data on the quantity and domains of visitors as well as determine whether any files were downloaded. Two leading providers of such monitoring software are Websense, Inc. (http://www.websense.com) and SurfControl (http://www.surfcontrol.com). Since this type of software is familiar to many, I will not describe it further here.
I am sometimes asked, however, whether it is possible to find out what websites are referring their visitors to another particular site or sites. Although many visitors find out about new sites when they execute a search, some are directed to new sites by hyperlinks appearing on the websites they browse. (The term "hyperlink" refers to any text, icon or graphic displayed on an Internet site that, when clicked, connects automatically to another site on the Internet. If it is text, it usually appears in a different color from the rest of the text. Hyperlinks are also referred to as "hot links.") For example, some of our clients post on their websites a textual or graphic hyperlink to our firm's homepage.
Finding out where these hyperlinks appear on the Internet might satisfy sheer curiosity, but there are other benefits as well. For instance, a company or firm that has changed its web address might want to advise the referring page to update its link (so that users clicking on the hyperlink do not receive the dreaded message: "HTTP Error 404 - File Not Found" or "this pagecannot be found"). If the organization has changed its logo, it might wish to supply a copy to the referring sites' webmasters. Other organizations might want this information simply to monitor whether such links are being used appropriately. In other cases, an entity might want to reciprocate for business or client-relations reasons. Or it might just want to know so it can thank the webmasters or their principals for establishing such links.
The quickest way to discover hyperlinks to a particular site is to go to one of the top search engines, such as http://www.google.com, http://www.netscape.com, or www.yahoo.com, to name only a few, and insert the following phrase (without spaces) into its search box:
link:yourwebaddress
where "yourwebaddress" is the URL of interest. This can be either a homepage or an associated page. For example, to search for sites that establish links to the FCBA's homepage, you would use the query "link:www.fcba.org" (without the quotes). If you were interested in finding websites that establish a link to my inagural FCBA article on ULS alternatives, you would use the query "link: http://www.fcba.org/includes/news_items/news_items_more.php?section_id=1&id=1" (again, without the quotes).
As with other searches, you will get a list of sites to review. Click on any of the sites to investigate where the hyperlink appears. Please note, however, that the link will not necessarily be easy to find on the referring page. It could be labeled as something quite different from the URL address you searched. For example, a hyperlink to the FCBA's homepage located at the URL http://www.fcba.org might appear on the referring page as "Federal Communications Bar Association" or "FCBA." Alternatively, the hyperlink might appear in the form of a graphic, such as the FCBA's logo, or even a picture.
The reason the hyperlink may not appear on the referring page exactly as searched is because the link-search tool does not scan the actual texts of the Internet web pages; instead it looks for the search term in the source code underlying the web pages. "Source code" is the set of special instructions behind each website that tell your browser how to set up the text or graphics on the web page and, in the case of hyperlinks, where to direct the user if a hyperlink is clicked. (The source code can be viewed by right-clicking on a web page and selecting "View Source.") For instance, a hyperlink labeled "F.C.C." on a web page would likely appear in the source code as:
F.C.C.
where "F.C.C." is the text that the source code instructs the browser to display on the web page in the form of a hyperlink and where the phrase "a href=http://www.fcc.gov" is the code that instructs the browser to go to the FCC's URL if the hyperlink is clicked by the user.
Moreover, the link-search tool will only find sites that have an actual hyperlink to your target; it will not uncover sites that simply mention the target's URL in the text of the web page (without a hyperlink embedded in the source code). A regular search would be required to accomplish this latter task.
In other words, digging up cross-references on the Internet involves a two-shovel approach. The first is used to conduct regular queries to uncover which sites contain cross-references in the bodies of their texts. The second is used to execute the link-search option described above to excavate which sites include hyperlinks in their source codes.
Watch out for buried communications lines!
Mr. DeSoto is an attorney at the law firm of Wiley Rein & Fielding LLP. He practices in the areas of wireless and wireline telecommunications, telephone company ratemaking, and equipment authorization. He previously worked in the FCC’s Common Carrier Bureau.
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