Checking Link Popularity
Oh what an important task!
What is the best way to see who’s linking to you (or your competitors)? It seems like ages ago now, but you used to be able to check your popularity by using the command line search in Google, link:www.domain.com and see who was linking to you, but in a link-driven Web, on a link-driven search engine, Google decided this info was to valuable to search marketers and they disabled the ability to get acurate data with this method.
Googlebot (Google’s crawler) and Slurp (Yahoo’s crawler) are very similar. They are just simple crawlers, each follows links and gathers information to bring home for analysis. These two engines algorithms are very different but their bots are alike. So we can deduce that whatever links Slurp crawls, Googlebot can see and also crawl.
So, let’s use Yahoo to check our link popularity and we can fairly confidently assume that Google would have similar results.
The way I use Yahoo for this task is to do the command line search, linkdomain:mydomain.com. This query will take you into Yahoo Site Explorer, where, BLAMO! it shows that there are about 1600 plus pages with links to my domain.
There are several ways to refine the query once you are at the Site Explorer. Some are built in fields at the top left of the page while other “modifiers” to the command line can show interesting results too.
If you don’t know what to do with this data then I will be happy to teach you in an SEO consultation, where I can teach you also about cutting edge applications you can get and use to REALLY dig out this info, with link reputation data also.
By the way, if you like this post, would you link to it, or me?
Ah, it’s good to be back.