Frank Gruber raised a good point in the comments following my post, Ping Your Way to a High Technorati Ranking, when he asked how does one know that another blog is linking to you.

I mentioned referring links and Google Blogsearch at the time, but here's a more thorough breakdown of ways you can track references to you site:

1. Referral Logs: If someone links to you, there's a good chance someone will click on that link, generating a new visitor to your site and a new line in your web statistics program's referral logs. The ease of discovering new referring links will depend on which stats package you use. We currently use 3-4 statistics packages to monitor traffic on this site in order to test the functionality of different programs. Out of the programs we've tested, the best program for this particular report has been Hitslink. This program provides a "Latest Visitors" report that shows you in real-time where your most recent visitors have come from:

Domains and IP addresses of visitors are blurred out to protect their privacy.

By quickly scanning this list for unfamiliar sites, new inbound links can be discovered. This is also a useful report for tracking conversations on other blogs where you've left comments since other comments often click through to check out who's left a comment.

2. Google Blogsearch: blogsearch.google.com is a great place to check for new inbound links from Blogger web sites. I've found that people with ________.blogspot.com sites are less likely to ping their blogs than the average blogger, so this is a particularly good place to look for pinging opportunities. Search for your site using the link: operator like this.

3. Icerocket: Icerocket does a nice job sorting the new inbound links to your site by date, so you can easily find what's new over a given date range. Search for your blog's domain like this to find new links.

4. Blogpulse: Blogpulse reports backlinks to your blog much like Icerocket, but offers a conversation tracking feature that allows you to track what people say about the posts about your site on other blogs. For example, site A says something about your site, then site B talks about site A. Wouldn't it be nice to know what they said too? Search for your site by the domain name like this.

5. Technorati: Technorati is probably the most popular link tracking site today. The major differentiating feature for bloggers is the blog ranking system that reports where your blog ranks among all blogs in the blogosphere. Search for your site by the domain like this.

Rather than visiting the above sites day after day looking for new linking opportunities, save yourself some time by subscribing to your site's search results using your favorite RSS reader like Bloglines. Let the actionable information come to you.

Did I miss anything? How do you track citations of your web site?