Who is linked to my site (or to my competitors)?

by Brian Magierski on October 25, 2006

Did you ever wonder who is linked to your site? How about who links to your competitors? Well in doing some further research on Search Engine Optimization to ensure that Kalivo’s Hubs are performing their best in playing with search engines, I came across this nice feature of Yahoo!’s search capability and would like to share it.

A search on Kalivo’s links shows the benefit of engaging on other people’s sites, rather than just merely blogging on your own. A lot of the links to Kalivo.com are a result of comments that we made on other people’s blogs and communities where we were making a contribution to their site.

The source of this information is SEOMoz.org. Thanks for the info! I spend so much time using Google that I sometimes forget to utilize some of the other wonderful tools out there on the web. (BTW – SEOMoz suggests that Google does a less than stellar job of link mapping, so Yahoo! is the preferred choice here).

At Yahoo!, the following searches can be used to find pages that link to other sites/pages:

1. Linkdomain:url.com
This command will show you all the pages that link to any page hosted at the domain url.com.

2. Link:http://www.url.com/page.html
This command will show only those pages which link directly to the specified page.

3. Linkdomain:url.com word
This search will show all pages with the term “word” that link to pages hosted at the URL. You can use this to find topical linking pages that may be providing benefit for specific areas.

4. Linkdomain:url.com -term
Use the – sign to indicate that pages which include a particular term should be excluded from the search; for example, searching for all links that point to a site that don’t contain your company name on the page (i.e. linkdomain:seobook.com -seomoz). Note that searches can contain multiple – signs and terms if you require very specific information (or wish to exclude lots of noisy data).

5. Linkdomain:url.com -site:url.com
In addition to the – sign as a term remover, you can remove sites from the results as well. This can be especially valuable if one large site links to the target site on every page, and you wish to see the links that don’t include that site. It can also be valuable to remove the site itself, (i.e. linkdomain:seomoz.org -site:seomoz.org), so as not to see results from internal pages.

So, for example, go to www.yahoo.com, and if you type in the search bar the following (without the quotes): “Linkdomain:kalivo.com”, you’ll see which sites and which pages link to Kalivo.

– brian

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