As mentioned in the flash discussion  i'm trying to polish up my corporate site...

one of the things i'm adding is a type of "as seen in..." section where i want to list some of the bigger cats that have recommended my sites

my way of going about findding who recmmended us is to do a search of incomming links for each site...this has produced some interesting results (just found out the BBC featured one of them in an article) but since a lot of my sites provide content we have a ton of inbound links from no name sites simply using our content. Therefor this method will take a veryyyyyyyyyy long time

any ideas on how i can go about doing this in a more efficient manner?

Nic, are you talking about referrers? If so can’t you just look at your analytics / site stats?

sorry i'm not looking to see who brings me traffic,

i'm looking to see what  CREDIBLE, RESPECTED, IMPORTANT, organization have RECOMMENED our sites...

...some real example of those that have would be BBC News, Ohio State University, UNESCO, and so forth

these don't need to be popular websites, UNESCO for example i'm sure isn't...but it is a respected organization (IMO) so it's pretty cool that they would recommed us

make more sense?

[edited title and catgory to suit the question better- sorry bout the confusion]

Ok,

I would take the following approach

I would write some PHP that scraped google for everyone linking to me (or who had my content) - no, make that yahoo if you're looking for links, yahoo tends to favour the more authoritative sites....

I would trim down all the urls to just domains and then count unique domains.

This would give me a list of the most frequent linkers to my site.

Hopefully, if ordered in descending order the top few would be easily recognised names.

If I didn't see anyone that stood out I would then query google for site:domain of all the unique domains and order the list by the number of pages google has indexed of each site [again, all through PHP] as this may give some idea of importance.

store all the results in a MySQL table and they're easily referred to, counted and manipulated

I can only speak for our business but we canvas our customers either electronically or via printed material, it depends on what metrics we are seeking at the time.

waveshoppe wrote:

I can only speak for our business but we canvas our customers either electronically or via printed material, it depends on what metrics we are seeking at the time.

sorry- i think i may not be explaining properly WS....i'm not looking for info FROM my customers but info ABOUT my customers (actually not about "customers" but people who recommend us- in our case this can be members, people who use our content, etc)

for example if the “Most Famous Surfer” ( I don’t surf so I don’t know who that is) loved to wear WaveShoppe shirts you may add a snippet somewhere on your site stating just that (whereas if Joe Blow loves your shirts no one would really care) –

- when important people or institution recommend you  it builds respect and credibility for your biz...what i am trying to find out is if any important or credible institutions have recommended any of my sites by running a search online

However when I run searches online for my sites they produce huge amounts of results and it would take a lot of time to sort through them

I think Northie’s suggesting could work- sites with lot’s of pages indexed could give some idea of importance and may help find some of the more credible/important recommendations (thanks North)

Any other ideas welcomed

when important people or institution recommend you  it builds respect and credibility for your biz...what i am trying to find out is if any important or credible institutions have recommended any of my sites by running a search online

Well I am still waking up so I may never understand your question, but what’s so wrong with asking the people who came to you on a recommendation? Do you not interact with them?

Not to be a smart ass but SEs wouldn’t know a credible institution if it bit them in the "you know what". So running a search online wouldn’t seem like it would produce anything beneficial.

waveshoppe wrote:

Well I am still waking up so I may never understand your question, but what’s so wrong with asking the people who came to you on a recommendation? Do you not interact with them?

yes i do but what your suggesting doesn't work exactly that well in this situation- perhaps need more clarification- thanks anyways

waveshoppe wrote:

Not to be a smart ass but SEs wouldn’t know a credible institution if it bit them in the "you know what". So running a search online wouldn’t seem like it would produce anything beneficial.

Sorry, but what happened to SE's favouring authoritative sites? Has something passed me by recently?

Well for the most part I am going to pass on this, but… I want to add that I am not saying that they are not favoring authoritative sites; but to the best of my knowledge there is no clear definition or indicator of what an authoritative site really is, so it’s more a case of beauty in the eye of the beholder than definition.

waveshoppe wrote:

...there is no clear definition or indicator of what an authoritative site really is, so it’s more a case of beauty in the eye of the beholder than definition.

I agree with that

Just use the site stats and then visit the referring pages to see how they have linked to you. Take no more time than mucking about coding stuff

I have to say it, but sorting them by PR (via Backlink checker) may show the more popular types that have linked to you. In the end, I would have to say a manual inspection could be the only way.

In the end a manual process would be the wawy for me.... Buy me a 2-4 ( a single brew won't do) and away I go ... hee hee

TheGypsy wrote:

Buy me a 2-4 ( a single brew won't do) and away I go ... hee hee

2-4??!?!? heck i could knock off a few my projects tonight with one of those (may not make for much productivity tomorrow morning though)

TheGypsy wrote:

but sorting them by PR (via Backlink checker)

any recommendations there of BL checkers that can sort via PR would be appreciated

Thanks!

Well, I have a few I use.. but there is a windows program that Aaron has - http://tools.seobook.com/backlink-analyzer/

Now, I am not sure how much information it sends back without the Google API - which they no longer give out. I have one from before G stopped handing them out :0)

So, try that, it may work..... if the non-API reports don't have PR then let me know and I can send U a report with it (in XLS)

perfect! i'll give that a try- thank you kindly