Google backward links

how do I..?

[dcallan]

Hi everyone,
A quick query. I read on this or someother
forum a member was asking if there was a way to
see backwards link on google excluding links from
my own site.

At the moment I have 138 links pointing to my url but
most of them are links from internet pages. Please advise
I how I can view links from external sites only.

[ciml]

I haven't found a way.

If you set the number of results per page to 100 then your backlinks should be clustered at the top of each page, making it much easier to see the external backlinks.

[RBuzz]

Google doesn't allow you to mix the link: syntax (which checks to see what pages link to a specified URL) with any other syntax. In AltaVista you could do this: link:http://www.example.com -domain:example.com but you can't do that in Google (and not just because Google doesn't support the domain: syntax! :->)

Actually I think I could use the Google API to make an application that would do this. Would you be interested?

[dcallan]

ciml

Just been doing a bit of research on another forum,
check the format of this search outl

link: www.YOURDOMAIN.com -site:www.YOURDOMAIN.com
makes perfect sense when you think about it logically

manually you can go to advanced search, in the first
search box type link:www.YOURDOMAIN.com and then go to
the domain section, switch only to don't and then
type in www.YOURDOMAIN.COM. and there you have it.
I suggest you set results to 100 nice a easy that way.

enjoy :-)
thanks for all the replies

[pageoneresults]

link: www.YOURDOMAIN.com -site:www.YOURDOMAIN.com

Unfortunately that does not work in Google. I tried it numerous times in the past and check occassionally and the feature is not supported. How did you get it to work?

<edit> Check that! It does work, I did not have a space between link:www... Cool! It won't work if the space is not there between link: www...

All this damn time I've been thinking that feature did not work. One simple space where it should be and viola, you can now view links outside of your domain.

Hey dcallan, great tip. I'm sure there are quite a few reading this thread thinking...

"Ha, they finally figured out!"

[nancyb]

now, this is really strange. My site hasn't shown any back links for almost a year now, but including the space and adding "site.com" without the quotes shows a bunch.

In other 'words':
link: site.com site.com shows 114 links
link:site.com 'did not match any documents'
link:site.com site.com 'did not match any documents'
link: site.com 'did not match any documents'

google toolbar: Backward links 'did not match any documents'

there also are a few variations if you include 'www' or the full url with 'http'

[Jill]

nancyb: I'm finding the same thing on one of my daughter's sites. She has near to 200 links into her site that are very on topic. One at least from a PR7 or 8 (don't have my glasses on!) site, though that is not showing yet in the links they list. She probably didn't get that before the last update. She gets lots of traffic just not from Google as her site for some reason is only a PR2-3.

[nancyb]

Yes, this is very strange. I actually have hundreds of links, but maybe all the link pages aren't in google. I do have links from sites (which are listed in google) with a PR7/6 on their link pages and a bunch with PR5's and 4's.

Now, I wonder if this could be part of the problem with getting ranked well again since I've commited no known "sins" since last year.

Hopefully googleguy will see this thread and comment.

[pvdm]

Hi Nancy,

I actually tried link: site.com site.com, and looked at the cache of the first result. That's what written in the Google banner:

These search terms have been highlighted: link
These terms only appear in links pointing to this page: site com site com

So it looks like what you are actually looking at, are:
1. results for the term 'link'.
2. and results for links containing the terms 'site' and 'com'

I does not look to me like you this is the way to find the external links pointing to your site without your own internal site links.

I have tried numerous different ways to find the solution to this simple query in Google. Didn't find it yet. I am trying the solution provided by Dcallan, but I am getting unconsistent results. I am not sure Google 'wants' us to find out...

[ciml]

That's right pvdm, "link: www.example.com" finds the same pages as "com example link".

[Mohamed_E]

I have tried numerous different ways to find the solution to this simple query in Google. Didn't find it yet.

Same here. What I do is go to Advanced Search, set number of results to 100, and save the page or pages returned. Then edit the HTML file, either interactively or with scripts (I use sed plus grep, perl would do a cleaner job), to remove my internal links.

Canned scripts break down whenever google changes the format of the SERP.