(NOTE: this is part of the “Blogging tips” series)
The question in the title is quite important for any kind of site, not just a blog. I’ll talk about the importance later. But, for now, how to find out who is linking to you?
If you’be been reading the series, you already know one method: your logs’ statistics. By looking into the “referrers” section of your statistics, you can usually find where people where before clicking on a link that took them to your blog.
If you’re clever (and you probably are, since you’re reading this :)), you’ll probably have noticed one slight problem with that: it only works when people actually click on such links. That is, if a site has a link to you, but nobody clicks on it, you won’t find out about it this way.
Fortunately, there are other methods.
First, search engines tend to index those links. You can go to Google or MSN Search, and search for “link:address” (ex. “link:www.thetlog.net“), or go to Yahoo! Search and search for “linkdomain:address“.
Two problems with the above, however. First, they can give you too many links (Yahoo shows about 1800 to this site, for instance). Second, they can give you no links at all. No, I haven’t gone that mad. 
Probably due to the Google Sandbox, this site is listed as having 0 - zero - pages linking to it, in Google. Remember that Yahoo says there are more than 1800. So, it probably takes a lot of time (this site is, as of now, about a month and a half old).
A great alternative to “normal” search engines is to use some services more oriented to blogs. Technorati, IceRocket and BlogPulse are three very good ones. They will show, very quickly and in a readable way, which blogs link to which, which articles link to each, how many blogs link to a particular one, and so on (they also have other services, but I won’t talk about them right now - but, by all means, browse through them!).
Having someone link to your articles is always nice - it brings traffic, and a sense of satisfaction because someone enjoyed your article, or found it useful. Also, you can now go to the article that linked to yours… maybe they’re talking about your article, and you may want to say something there… or maybe that’s a blog with a subject similar to yours, and which deserves to be added to your feed aggregator. Who knows…
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