SEO Pirate’s Tips to Find More Back Links

Ahoy! This post is gonna be about finding SEO’s biggest treasure – links.

If you, like many pirates, use search engines to hunt backlinks to a site, you know they only show 1,000 incoming links per domain. All search-engine based backlink checkers also inherit this limit. But a thousand links is often not enough because the best link sources get left off board. Here’s me list of tips that will help you break through this limit and get ur hands deep into the search engines’ links chest.

#1 Exclude internal links

Just to make this post more complete let’s start with a bit of basics. Every old salt knows thatYahoo! is the best search engine for checking links. So the simplest way to check who’s linking to a site is to go to Yahoo! and search for

link:site.com

This gets you a list of links to the site.

Now unless you’re interested in the navigational structure and interlinking you exclude the in-links by adding -site:site.com modifier so that your full query looks like this

link:site.com -site:site.com

#2 Checking deep links

This one actually lies on the surface, but I think it’s worth mentioning. Mostly we just check the links to the domain. But if you search for links pointing to deeper pages you’ll get a better overview of a site’s link profile. Identify some of the better ranking web pages and search for links to them e.g.

link:site.com/testimonials.html or link:site.com/reviews.html

#3 Sort out backlinks coming from certain domains

Quite often the 1,000 links list you get will contain a large chunk of links coming from the same domain. It maybe a site-wide link, an ad, etc. Use the -site:linkingsite.com modifier to remove the links from this domain from the results. They will be substituted with new links from other places.

You can use -site: several times to exclude links from multiple domains e.g.

link:site.com -site:en.wikipedia.com -site:ezinearticles.com

#4 Search for links coming from domains with certain TLDs

This can be useful not only for getting a longer link list but also for checking whether a site has .gov, .edu and other valuable links. The query looks like this

linkdomain:site.com site:.com

#5 Sort out links from domains with certain TLDs

The opposite of the previous operator. Add -site:.tld modifier to exclude links from certain TLDs. In most cases the biggest chunk of links comes from .com’s. So the ovious option to start with is

linkdomain:site.com -site:.com

#6 Combinations of the above

The search operators mentioned above should get you a lot more than a 1,000 links. The good thing is you can combine them to drive this number further. Just to give you a taste

linkdomain:site.com site:.org -site:seomoz.org

This way you get a list of links to site.com coming from .org sites except for seomoz.org

#7 Use other search engines

Yahoo! is the best when it comes to finding links. But that doesn’t mean you should ditch all the rest. You can find out who’s linking to a site on a number of other search engines including Google, AllTheWeb, Alexa, Exalead and more. They may be using slightly different link commands but are worth checking out. Here’s a list of search engines that provide backlink data.

#8 Use spyglass

Doing it all by hand is a hell lot of work to do, especially on big sites. Good news is we have a nifty SEO tool to do all the hard work for you – SEO SpyGlass. With it you can see further and spot more links, ARRRR!

SpyGlass is currently the only link analysis tool that uses advanced search operators (like the ones mentioned above) to get more than 1,000 links from the search engines. It pulls up to50,000 links per domain from over 320 search engines. The tool also digs up a lot of data for link analysis:

• The exact URL and title of the linking webpage;
• If the link is actually on the page (search engines will often show you the links that no longer exist – links get removed but the search engine doesn’t know about it until it re-crawls the page. With SEO SpyGlass you get the most up-to-date data.);
• Whether the link is dofollow or nofollow;
• The exact anchor text of each link (anchors are just as important for SEOs as they are for pirates);
• Google PageRank of the domain and more importantly – the PR linking page;
• The total number of outbound links on the linking page;
• Estimated value of each link (based on the page PR and the number of outbound links);
• Whether the linking domain is listed in the Dmoz and Yahoo directories;
• Alexa rank;
• The age of the linking domain.