: If you want to get a true picture of what sites are linking to yours, you may want to consider some kind of server side web stats software that looks at the actual log files of your web

@Chiappetta492

If you want to get a true picture of what sites are linking to yours, you may want to consider some kind of server side web stats software that looks at the actual log files of your web server (SmarterStats, WebTrends, and AWStats are a few examples). You need to make sure your log files are capturing the referrer.

Google Analytics is an outstanding package and can give you a really good picture of traffic on your site, but in some cases does require some additional configuration of the code on your site. File downloads (.pdf, .doc, .xls, etc.) that do not have the Google Analytics tracking code on them will not have data captured (see here for more information on how to configure this). In addition, if a user clicks away from your site before the Google Analytics script has loaded, you may miss capturing information from that traffic as well.

By using server side web stats tracking, the web server logs themselves don't lie and will tell you exactly what was requested and who requested it.

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