Link search with Yahoo's linkdomain

On how to find pages linking to your own site.

By Lars Våge

The new Yahoo! Search engine does indeed have some good features, so there is something to comfort us while we mourn the fact that Yahoo! has closed down the Alltheweb and Altavista search engines.

Link search works really well in Yahoo! if you know the right syntax. I know this after reading ResearchBuzz.

Let’s say I would like to know which web pages at Internetbrus.com that are being linked to, apart from the front page. How could I get this information?

In Yahoo! Search there are two search codes that can help, link and linkdomain. The latter is not even documented in the Yahoo! Help pages.

The first one searches for inbound links – it finds all pages that link to exactly the page you tell it to. So link:internetbrus.com will find all pages that link to the Internetbrus home page? No, it’s not that simple. In Yahoo! you have to write link:http://internetbrus.com or there will be zero hits.

link:http://internetbrus.com gets 539 hits and link:http://www.internetbrus.com 390 hits and link:http://www.internetbrus.com OR link:http://internetbrus.com 941 hits.

Are there even more links to Internetbrus? This is where linkdomain comes in. With linkdomain you can search for all pages that link to any page within a domain.

So do you write linkdomain:http://internetbrus.com? Sadly not – using linkdomain it is necessary to drop the http:// part!

linkdomain:internetbrus.com gets "about 1300" hits.

And now for the big question: Which pages within the Internetbrus website are being linked to? Is it possible to combine the two syntaxes described here? Sure you can.

linkdomain:internetbrus.com -link:http://internetbrus.com -link:http://www.internetbrus.com gets 354 hits.

But wait a minute; there are lots of internal links among these hits. How do we eliminate them? Maybe we could weave in the search code site, which is used to tell the search engine that you want the hits to come from a specified domain. And we use a subtraction sign to exclude hits from our own domain:

linkdomain:internetbrus.com -link:http://internetbrus.com -link:http://www.internetbrus.com -site:internetbrus.com gets 205 hits.

Clever, Yahoo! Google only has the search code link to find inbound links to specific pages, and this function has been reported by many to give incomplete results. Furthermore, it can’t be combined with other searches, not even a regular search term. Not so clever, Google.

After having browsed some of the hits in Yahoo! using this long query (are there people out there actually using complex queries like this?) I have confirmed that the hits are genuine.

Unfortunately, among these pages I found a link to a page we made but no longer link to ourselves because it is no longer current. Not so clever, Internetbrus. After finishing writing this little article, I will remove it at once.

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