Member Avatar for lingoway

Hello friends

I just want to know that how can i get to know that google has followed my link?


For example.

I post my view in one of the thread in a forum. Search engine's spider come to that thread and indexed it.

Now by cache date i can get to know that this thread is crawled by search engine's spider, but how do i come to know that spider has followed the links in my signature?

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  • Latest Post Latest Post by joy12

Dani AI

Generated

— short answer: the only definitive proof that a crawler followed your signature link is seeing the crawler request the target URL on your server. Third‑party backlink tools or consoles (as , and hinted) can suggest discoveries, but they are not as precise as your own logs.

Practical checklist:

  • Check your webserver access logs for requests to the exact URL you linked. Example (adjust the path and logfile):

    grep "GET /path/to/your/page" /var/log/apache2/access.log | tail -n 50

grep "GET /path/to/your/page" /var/log/apache2/access.log | awk -F'"' '{split($1,a," "); print a[1] " | " $6}' | sort | uniq -c

    That shows IPs and user‑agents that fetched the page.

  • Verify bot identity (UA strings can be faked) by doing a reverse DNS lookup on the IP and then forward lookup on the hostname to confirm it maps back to the same IP. Follow the official verification steps for major crawlers (example: Googlebot verification).

  • If you cannot access logs: use a unique redirect/tracking URL you control (if allowed), or inspect the forum HTML to see if the signature link is rel="nofollow" (nofollow reduces the chance a crawler will follow it). You can fetch the raw thread with curl and search for your link.

Caveats: forum rules may forbid tracking tweaks; user‑agent headers are spoofable; always do reverse DNS checks to trust a crawler request. For Googlebot verification and rel=\"nofollow\" details see Google's docs on verifying crawlers and link handling (Verify Googlebot, ). had the right idea about using search tools as complements to the log-based approach.

Recommended Answers

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Member Avatar for aumkiiweb

You can use Google Backlink Checker. Else another option is SEO Doctor, a mozilla plug in which gives more functions.

Member Avatar for itsyllabus

Well there are alot of different software who can track your seo work but the best free way is to check through yahoo site explorer its better .

Member Avatar for Dani

Google Webmaster Tools, Yahoo! Site Explorer ... As they said :)

Member Avatar for joy12

Google webmaster tool really can help you...

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