1. Excluding internal links
In order to get this post to be complete, let’s start from the begining. Every experienced surfer is aware that if you want to check links, the most preferable is Yahoo!. So if you want to know who links to any site, you just search, in Yahoo! by typing, for instance, link:URL Note that URL here is the site address.
You will be given a list containing links to the site. If you are interested in the interlinks and structure of the navigation you may remove the in-links replace it with the modifier, -site:URL thereby making the full query to appear like this; link:URL –site:URL.
2. Checking deep links
Even though it looks superficial, this is worthy of mention. Often the domain links is what we check. However if we are searching for links to pages that are deeper we will get a better view of the link profile of a site. We are able to identify a few of the sites and web pages that are of higher ranks and could start searching for their links, for instance, link:URL/reviews.html or link:URL/testimonials.html
3. Sorting out back links coming from some particular domains
Most of the times if you’ve got a list of say, a thousand links, it will contain mostly links from one particular domain. It could be an ad, or some other kind of links. You can use the modifier; -site: linkingsite.com to remove this domain’s links. You use links in other places to replace them.
Hence the modifier, –site, can be used a lot of times to remove links from several domains, for instance, link:URL -site:porns.com -site:football.com.
4. Searching for links coming from domains with certain TLDs
Apart from being used to get a longer list of links, this could also be used to find out if links such as, .gov, .edu, etc, are contained by a site. The query will appear in this form; linkdomain: URL site:.com.
5. Sorting out links from domains with certain TLDs
Here you could add the tld modifier, -site, to remove links from certain TLDs. Mostly the links are .coms. Obviously you have to use linkdomain: site.com –site:.com.
6. Combining the above
The search operators outlined above could get a thousand links or more. It’s often convenient to combine them in order to increase the number of links. For example you can have, linkdomain:URL:.org –site:porns.org. This enables you to get a list of links from .org sites except porns.org.
7. Make use of alternative search engines.
Yahoo! is unequalled in case of links finding. However, some others such as Exalead, Google, AllTheWeb, Alexa, etc, are need not be neglected. Their link commands might be slightly different but they can as well be worth your while.
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