You linkin’ at me? Why Yahoo! is better than Google for finding inbound links

I heard about this brilliant tip from Paul Silver at Barcamp Brighton this weekend, and not being able to find much about it on the web thought I’d write it up. This material comes from Paul’s presentation about ethical SEO.

Google sucks at displaying the number of incoming links to your website when you search using “link:www.yourdomain.com”, supposedly because companies could use that to find people who linked to their competitors.

Yahoo! on the other hand, makes no bones about this, and there is a really neat trick you can use to find a much better approximation to the number of inbound links to your site:

linkdomain:www.yourdomain.com -site:www.yourdomain.com

This looks for all links to http://www.yourdomain.com but the “-site” part tells Yahoo! to ignore all links that originate from pages on http://www.yourdomain.com.

Easy. Thanks Paul!

This entry was written by jayfresh and posted on September 11, 2007 at 4:34 pm and filed under web with tags , , , , , , , , . Bookmark the permalink. Follow any comments here with the RSS feed for this post. Both comments and trackbacks are currently closed.

4 Comments

  1. marci11
    Posted September 12, 2007 at 7:48 pm | Permalink

    hey, i really enjoyed this blog about yahoo inbound links, it’s helpful to know this little known fact. Thanks for posting!

  2. jayfresh
    Posted September 13, 2007 at 5:02 pm | Permalink

    No worries, thanks for reading!

  3. Dallas Web Builders
    Posted September 23, 2007 at 11:51 am | Permalink

    no i dont think so . google is still the search king . and i think wikipedia is far better than the yahoo search .

  4. jayfresh
    Posted September 24, 2007 at 1:32 pm | Permalink

    Wikipedia? How so?


2 Trackbacks/Pingbacks

  1. By Top 5 things I learnt at barcamp brighton « Jay Fresh on September 11, 2007 at 5:05 pm

    […] particularly web-savvy 4. Fame on YouTube comes from doing something cool in a different way 5. The real way to search for links to your […]

  2. By Kerry Buckley » Quoted in the Times! on September 14, 2007 at 11:04 am

    […] in the Times! By Kerry So I was reading Jon’s post about Paul’s SEO talk at Barcamp Brighton, and thought I’d give the tip for finding incoming links […]