dumb google question

using -site with link

[dcheney]

Howdy,

I'm sorry for asking a somewhat dumb question, but I've been trying now for a few weeks and haven't figured out a way to do a google search with both "=site" and "link". What I want to do is:

-site:mydomain.com link:mydomain.com

What I'm trying to get is a list of who's linking to my site, while excluding all of my own internal links. Unfortunately this doesn't seem to work. Any suggestions?

[martin]

You can't mix a link: search with anything else.

[allanp73]

Try using
site:mydomain.com (some search string that every page of your site has)

Giving you the number of pages of site indexed.
Then use:

link:mydomain.com
Giving the total number of links pointing to your site.

Then just subtract the two, giving you the number of external links indexed by Google.

I know you would looking to do this in one step but the two step is just as easy.

[allanp73]

I hope the above helps :>

[cminblues]

Try using
site:mydomain.com (some search string that every page of your site has)

You can also use:
-randomgarbagecharacterstring site:www.yourdomain.com

;)

cminblues

[dcheney]

allan,

Good suggestion, except I'd rather (if possible) see _who_ is linking to my site, not just how many.

Another option would be to search for:
(my site name) -site:mydomain.com

The down side is that it probably only reports those linking to the main page using my site name as the link title. This group unfortunately is the least interesting (imo).

[Hagstrom]

Try using
site:mydomain.com (some search string that every page of your site has)

Actually it's better to put a minus sign before some term that's not on any of the pages:

site:mydomain -abc123

link:mydomain.com
Giving the total number of links pointing to your site.

Nope. First of all, the figure Google returns is misleading since she will only show you half the links that she promises you (we went through this in a recent thread).
Besides, Googles has an undocumented feature (=bug) and will only show links from pages with a PR4 or more.

Another option would be to search for:
(my site name) -site:mydomain.com

Don't forget to put (my site name) in quotes: "mysite.com" -site:mysite.com
or add a plus sign: mysite.+com -site:mysite.com
But the results are still buggy.

[gmoney]

What I'm trying to get is a list of who's linking to my site, while excluding all of my own internal links." -dcheney

I have a suggestion that may or may not be useful to you. Basically, find the results for backlinks as usual and then put a &num=100 at the end of the URL. Then you can cut and paste 100 results at a time into excel (or something) and once in excel (or something) you are only a few commands away from the list you are looking for.

I imagine the whole process would only take a couple minutes more than the cut and paste operation.

[WebGuerrilla]

The best way to get a list of linking sites is to use Fast's Advanced Search [alltheweb.com].

Use the word filters set to:

Must Include: domain.com in links to URL
Must Not Include: domain.com in URL

Using Google's filter to only look in links pointing to a url only finds your domain in the anchor text. Using it at Fast finds the domain in the actual link.

[gmoney]

I have to agree that Alltheweb is the best source of backlinks.

However, Google’s results are a nice compliment because you can tell which linking pages have a reasonably high PageRank. Google might also find a few links that Alltheweb didn’t.

It may also be useful to find backlinks on Altavista, MSN, and Hotbot as well.

[Mohamed_E]

A variation on gmoney's cut and paste approach, conceptually the same but details differ:

1. Do search from Advanced Search with number of results set to 100.
   
2. Save as single HTML page.
   
3. Process the saved files to your taste, either with a text editor or with UNIX command line utilities (sed plus grep) or with a toy perl program. However you do it it is easy to exclude links from your own site.