Chapter 4 of Web Literacy for Educators

Chapter 4 in Web Literacy for Educators was about using forward and back links to help students decide if a website is legitimate. This is the last step in the REAL process. The forward link can be used to get to a link from your website to a page on someone else’s website. The backward link can be used to link from someone else’s website to your website.
The forward links are highlighted on the web page. If you click on them, the website that is linked to it will appear. The main questions students need to ask themselves with forward links are “What are the URLs of the forward link?” and “Do the domain names change?” Red flags would be if every single forward link contained the same domain name in the URL as the homepage. Also if the same person writes all of the referenced materials in the forward links. The latter was compared to an author who writes a book and all of the referenced sources with it. If this happened, then his or her work would not be of academic quality.
To check the back links you must follow these steps:
1. Go to http://www.altavista.com/.
2. In the search box type link:
3. Leaving no space after the colon, type the address of the website you are
you are researching. For example, to find the back links to our school website, you
would type link:http://www.buhlerschools.org/index.aspx?nid=57.
4. Click the Find button and you will find an assortment of sites that are linked
to us.
Questions students would want to ask are: “Who is linked to the website?” “Why are they linked?” and “What do other sites say about the material on the site?” A look to see who has linked to a site gives you an idea about the quality of the information. If there are few or no links then, probably the website is not from an academic or legal field.