So I'm playing around with the MSN operators as per my post from last week and I stumble upon the holy grail of link searches:
(linkdomain:kennedyfunding.com linkdomain:hardmoneyfunding.com) (-linkdomain:avatarfinancial.com)
This search is showing only those pages that link to both kennedyfunding.com and hardmoneyfunding.com but do not link to avatarfinancial.com. You can actually use this to find co-citation linkers that currently exclude your domain and link to your competitors.
One more example - this one on SEO. These are sites that link to Matt Cutts, Aaron Wall and the SEOConsultants directory but don't link to SEOmoz:
You can build some damn cool tools with these operators. Let's all pray that MSN doesn't shut them down.
UPDATE: Yahoo! appears to provide accurate data on these searches too. More research coming soon.
It's been pretty helpful to find blogrolls and that kind of stuff now that I'm blogging again and want to get rolled by the SEO blog-o-spherians. Our tools are built around the Y! Site Explorer API, and I think that will prove a richer source of data. For a quick look, it's nice to have engines supporting some "obvious" search operators like this.
While calculating link popularity for my site www.goldbar.net I found 581 results with query "link:https://www.goldbar.ne" and 4,860 results with query "linkdomain:www.goldbar.net".
So in terms of real SEO, what is real and industry define "standard" link popularity of my site, 581 or 4,860?
Please help me urgently.
Atiq,
There is no real industry standard measurement. Most people would look at the 581 total links to your home page. I would suggest using a tool like Backlink Analyzer to check Yahoo's backlinks for your domain, using their web service API. Exclude links from your own domain when you run the report. Then look at the reported number of class C links - this will show you how many web sites are linking to your web site.
This is the most reliable measurement of competition (vs. actual rankings) that we've found.
It's even more useful if we filter out the domains on our big list of text-link-sellers, but that's another story for another day.
for my site link:www.search-engines-optimizations.com and linkdomain:www.search-engines-optimizations.com both are not working with MSN. I think Microsoft have removed the comands search. Please anyone updates about how to search no of website linking to perticular website. Thanks in Advance.
Rand, hate to come in late and whizz all over the thing, but is this really all that great? The Holy Grail? It's still a regular search result that returns web pages, not web sites, isn't it?
Hasn't Yahoo already given us a lot more to work with in this area, with a deeper index and the same operators? Wouldn't it be better to build tools using the Site Explorer and Search APIs?
Dan - with MSN, you can pull without limit as long as you do it off their RSS feed. I think that "holy grail" may be an oversell, but it does allow you to get a lot more value by seeing whose linking to multiple competitors at once and pulling out those that already link to your site.
Nice work Matt and Rand!
You owe me a lunch now :)
Holy moly - John? Blast from the past indeed...
I like how you can combine other operators on top of that .
Links to all three, but not seomoz, from a page that has title including the term seo: (intitle:seo) (linkdomain:mattcutts.com linkdomain:seobook.com linkdomain:seoconsultants.com) (-linkdomain:seomoz.org)
Links to seobook and seoconsultants, but not seomoz, from a page that is linked to by the term seo: (inanchor:seo) (linkdomain:seobook.com linkdomain:seoconsultants.com) (-linkdomain:seomoz.org)
etc.
Btw, I'm seeing more comprehensive results over at Yahoo for similar queries.
Not directly related (and have been mentioned somewhere else), if you just use -link:somedomain.com you get a result which maybe shows how many webpages they have indexed.
MSN: 5 316 547 546 Google: 17,870,000,000 (Big Daddy: 25,270,000,000)
Yahoo don't want to work together with me on this one.
the "-" is the key. You can use -sfafafs also and get basically the same results, just fyi.
Nice find.
Your interview with Ammon Johns had a section where he metioned SEM firms spending a day each week just doing research.
I've been allocating time each week just doing lots of backlink analysis on the top ranking sites in various industries. You find a lot of interesting stuff that way.
So, in other words, we can see who links to our competitors, but not to us? Gives us good info on who to go after, and say, "hey, yo, dude, why ya not linkin' to us? you're not giving your users all the info they need!"
or something like that... :)