Is there a way to check if there are symbolic links pointing to a directory?
I'd use the find command.
find . -lname /particular/folder
That will recursively search the current directory for symlinks to /particular/folder. Note that it will only find absolute symlinks. A similar command can be used to search for all symlinks pointing at objects called "folder":
find . -lname '*folder'
From there you would need to weed out any false positives.
You can audit symlinks with the symlinks program written by Mark Lord -- it will scan an entire filesystem, normalize symlink paths to absolute form and print them to stdout.