I have a very specific question, which I'll illustrate below. This is different than what can be handled with a basic backlink tool. But there must be the technology somewhere that tracks this.
Here's the situation: I need to find a tool that tracks down ALL the links that go to a specific website, including the links that won't necessarily be on the sitemap or easy to find.
Specifically, I want to find the URLs that will be on a 3rd party affiliate site that point to that site.
Example: The main company is Apple. Apple hires affiliate sites to point traffic to their site and the affiliate will get a commission for every purchase that occurs through their link. So Apple hires www. GreatComputerDeals. com to get business for them. Apple gives these guys the link www.Apple.com/affilate0001234 to put on their site. So people go to www. GreatComputerDeals. com, get talked into buying a computer from Apple and click www. Apple.com /affilate0001234, where they then buy a computer. The page on the Apple site they end up on is just the Apple.com main page, but it has the affiliate code of "/affiliate0001234" attached to it to track the sale for the affiliate.
WHAT I NEED TO FIND OUT: I need to find a tool that can generate ALL of those affiliate pages www. Apple.com /affilate0001234 www. Apple. com /affilate0001235 www. Apple. com /affilate0001236 www. Apple. com /affilate0001237 and so on.
AND which affiliate websites the people who clicked on those links and ended up on apple.com came from. In other words, I need then the list of www. GreatComputerDeals. com websites.
A regular backlink checker tool won't show these links. But these links do get clicked and people go to the website. So there must be technology to backtrack and see where people came from and through what link.
PLEASE USE SMALL NON-TECHNICAL WORDS :o)
Matt
