Kimler Adventure Pages (http://randsco.com)

When it comes to finding which websites link to your domain, or to a specific URL within your domain, Yahoo!Search beats the pants off of Google search. Find out why.

Who Links to Your Internal Web Pages?
Why Yahoo Search Soars Over Google

One measure of the relevancy ("success" or contribution) of a website, is to find how many other people reference (link to) its pages. To answer this question, until now anyway, I've headed to the search engine I usually use - Google.

By typing link:randsco.com into a Google search box, it spits back a list of sites that link to this domain. (Instructions for this - and other - advanced Google operators).

Doing the above yields about 200 results and going down the list, one can see which sites link to our domain. Unfortunately, many of the results are actually randsco webpages or they are sites where I have placed a link (e.g., comments I've made on other blogs, newsgroups or forums). It sure would be nice to eliminate those and see only other people linking in. (Particularly useful tracking down folks violating our copyright policy, by using our CSS techniques and PHP scripts for commercial purposes and bypassing the "donation required" step).

Step aside Google, because this is where Yahoo beats the pants off of your - very simple - "link:" search. Yahoo!Search is more powerful, more accurate and more comprehensive.

To learn about the power of Yahoo's inbound link searching and how to stretch your link-searching muscles .... read on ...

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Google: A Question of Accuracy

Two hundred links seems a tad on the low side and it made me wonder about the accuracy of Google's "link:" operator.

An easy way to verify this is to utilize a regular google search, using the domain as a keyword: randsco.com. The resulting list has now grown considerably, from around 200 to about 2500. Mind you, not all the returns are links, some are just pages that contain the URL as text and - of course - many are again, from within the randsco domain. Still, it's quite a jump.

Taking it one step further, it's possible to omit the returns from the randsco domain, by using the following: randsco.com -site:randsco.com. The results are all websites that contain the keyword "randsco.com", but don't come from the randsco.com domain - about 1700 websites in all.

It's a much more comprehensive list, though it does contain some esoteric results, as well as sub-domain results and URL-as-text results. At the very least, it sheds some very serious light on the inaccuracy of the "link:" operator of Google.

 

Yahoo!Search: A Better, More Powerful Tool

Yahoo search has a much better, more powerful and more accurate way to check on inbound links. There's two operative commands that are important in Yahoo: link: and linkdomain:. Using these may pop the results into Yahoo's "Site Explorer" (and in their most basic forms, can be utilized there).

Yahoo's linkdomain: operative is used when you want to find a list of all sites that link to any page of a given domain. The syntax is: linkdomain:randsco.com, which kicks the results up in Yahoo's "Site Explorer" as showing inbound links from All Pages for the Entire Site (1,871 in our case).

Using either the comand line, or "Site Explorer", it's possible to exclude inbound links from within the domain in question, either with the syntax: linkdomain:randsco.com -site:randsco.com or by toggling the "Except from this domain" dropdown. The resulting number is 1,780, in our case.

Yahoo's link: operative is used to find a list of sites that link to a specific URL. The syntax is: link:randsco.com, which also results in the Yahoo's "Site Explorer", when run from a normal Yahoo's search, or which can be kicked off by toggling the "Only to this URL" bit in the "Site Explorer" drop-down. (Interesting that randsco.com results in 133 in-bound links, regardless of whether we include randsco.com or not).

Don't forget that there's often a WWW and non-WWW version of every domain. (We've elected to omit the WWW part, though either will resolve to the correct location.) One can run a link:www.domain.com and a link:domain.com to see which has a stronger following, or run both - with an "OR" operator between them, to get a listing of all inbound links that utilize one or the other.

As a final howdy-doody, I noted that one can also run a command line search for all inbound links, omitting any from within a domain using: linkdomain:randsco.com -site:randsco.com. The results don't pop open the Yahoo "Site Explorer" page and result in many more hits (3400) than does (what I think would be a similar query on the "Site Explorer" page ... i.e., "Show Inlinks from All Pages (Except from this domain) for the Entire Site", which results in only 1780).

I guess it's proof that it's all a black box and your smileage may vary.

 

Conclusions

Google's "link:" operator appears to be limited to a specific URL (though fails, if you try it on a specific internal page).

Yahoo Search (or "Site Explorer") offers more robust tools to search for in-bound links, though the results need to be taken with a grain of salt.

Seeing who is linking to your pages is interesting, but one of those exercises that can lead to a LOT of wasted time. (I got a giggle out of the number of pople that hot-linked randsco photos, but only ended up with big, fat red X's).

I remain undecided about what to do (if anything) about people violating our copyright policy, but at least, I have a way of finding who some of them are.

Since I wasted the morning on this, the least I could do was document my wastage.

Hope this helps you, in some way.

 

References

1) Yahoo's linkdomain search tool

2) Google's Advanced Search Operators