Removing those backlinks from your eHow articles

What to do about the backlinks going to your eHow articles?

Well, eHow is gone now, and whether you sold your articles or removed them you're left with one big question: what to do about those backlinks.

There's nothing you can do that doesn't require some work and time, but you can try to remove them, one by one. First you have to find them.

First I used the SEOBook toolbar for FireFox, locating backlinks by clicking the Y! button for the Yahoo! page links. There are two of the Y! buttons, so you have to be sure you have the right one:

Click the screenshots to get a big image. From the left, you'll see PageRank and right next to it is Y! If you hover over the Y! it will say Yahoo! Page Links. This one shows the links to your particular page you're on. The second Y!, which is down a little more to the right, shows you the links to the domain. So if you were trying to find links to my eHow article How to Be Truly Tolerant, you'd want to click the first Y! -- the second Y! will give you all the links to the domain eHow.com. 

Click the first Y!, and then you'll get a page like this, below:

 In the upper right corner, there is a small drop-down box that is labeled "Show Inlinks" -- make sure that is set on "Except from this domain". This will show you the links to your page from other sites. Now for this particular article, I found a bunch of junk -- they are weird links to eHow.com. But you can see number 3 is a legitimate link -- thanks Vallain!

If you click any of the links, you can go to the site and see what it's about. Occasionally, I get to a site and can't locate the link to my article, but usually, it's somewhere on the page. If it's a good link -- say a cooking site has linked to one of your recipes -- you can try emailing them with a link to your article's new home, and ask if they would mind updating their site for you. If it's a useless, bad neighborhood link, just forget it.

Now, if you go back to the little drop-down box in the upper right, you can choose "all links", and you'll see all the ones you just saw, plus the ones eHow has linked to your article -- just interesting. It may give you some ideas of how to do your links on your websites.

OK, that's just Yahoo!'s links. I also used LinkDiagnosis.com. The other icons on the SEOBook toolbar aren't so helpful for checking backlinks. You'll have to register at LinkDomain, and download the FireFox add-on. Even tho you download the add-on, you still actually go to LinkDiagnosis.com to check your URL. This works great, because it lets you save your reports, and you can even make a project, such as eHow articles, and save all the eHow article reports in one project. It's easy to use, but note one thing: there is a tiny link called "Filters" just under the left side of the box where you put in your URL. Click that and there is a PageRank button and a Yahoo! button at the far left. Then a drop down box labeled "Site Settings", which you should click and select "single page" -- if you don't do this you will end up making a huge, lengthy report for all of eHow.com. You can leave all the other filters as they are:

 Click start, and here are the results:

 One puny link from squidoo (thanks again to Vallain!) -- I wasn't doing a great job of backlinking as you can see. Most of my eHow articles were written well before I learned how important backlinks are, and once I did learn, eHow was already on decline. Still -- I maybe could have added some links and made more money for this past year.

Now, click Save, and it will give you the choice of saving the report, saving it to a project already set up, or making a new project to save it in.

I did get some backlinks on here that I didn't get on Y! Links Pages. 

Now, whatever backlink checker you use, if you get a huge number of links, double check whether it is giving you all the links inbound and outbound, all the links to the entire eHow.com domain, or all of the links to your article, including those that eHow has placed.

In most cases, you'll probably have a pretty good shot at getting back a number of your links.

Let me know if you have some better backlink checkers. I found one accidentally about a month ago that looked fantastic, but I have not been able to find it again to save my life.