Keeping track of backlinks in Drupal 7

A popular feature request for sites that deal with a lot of content, is to see for each page what other pages are linking back to it. This can be helpful when doing some SEO or cleaning up and rewriting old content.

In Drupal 7 this is easily done. It exists where you wouldn't immediately expect it though: the core search module. Kind of mimicking how search bots like Google's indexer works, Drupal 7's search module now takes the amount of nodes linking back to another node to calculate the score for some result.

To keep track of which nodes (and other) link to which other ones, the search indexer stores all links in a table called search_node_links. This table is only used internally by the search module though, but if you enable the Views module, you can enable a default view called "Backlinks".

The Backlinks view has 2 displays: a block and a page. The block you can put wherever you want, the page is added as an extra tab on each node next to "view" and "edit".

You can also choose to create your own views using the "Search: Links to" and "Search: Links from" argument and filter.

Let me finish this quick tip by mentioning that this feature works fine with url aliases too.

Note: It appears this was already possible in Drupal 6. Check out the update.