Creating an “Inbound Links” Link

From the beginning I wanted to include some tips on this site for new and novice bloggers. It's time to start posting on that subject again.

Yesterday at work (yes, I work on Saturdays) I spotted some neat features in Joystiq's posts that I wanted to include on this site. Specifically, I spotted the "Linking Blogs" link and thought it was a great idea. For a blog author it provides a quick way to check for blogs linking to their site, for visitors it gives a working resource for finding more items that are related to the post they're reading.

It also takes advantage of a great service provided by Technorati so why not enjoy it?

I'm not going to cover all the details about formatting a link like this but I thought I'd include a quick reference for how to build the link itself.

On Technorati you can track incoming links by simply running a search for your post's url and selecting the "in blog posts" field. You can do this through the form on their site or by linking to Technorati in a special way.

If, for example, I were to search for my website I'd enter "http://bill2me.com" into the search box, select "in blog posts" and then hit search. The URL for the resulting search would look like this:

If I were to link directly to that page, Like This, I'd see all the links coming into Bill2me.com from other blogs.

With this knowledge I can go ahead and punch in the permalink for ANY of my posts to see the blogs linking directly to that post. It's a great way to check a post's acceptance across other blogs as well as see what others are saying about your post.

Now the trick is to automate it for each post.

As I said before, this is based on your post's permalink. That means that you can use the WordPress the_permalink() tag to automate the process. At the bottom of this post you'll see a link reading "Inbound Links." The following is the code used to generate that link.


<a href="http://technorati.com/search/<?php the_permalink(); ?>">Inbound Links</a>


Using the link above I can generate a link directly to the Technorati page showing all blog based links heading towards my post.

Very simple, very straightforward, very easy.