Getting only my own domain's pages when using link:

[yoyo8]

Why is it that when I do link:www.mydomain.com I get back my own domain's pages. I am only interested in seeing which sites link to me. How do I do this?

[Susanne]

Generally the Google link check only brings links from pages with a pagerank of 4 but this varies sometimes. Google will never show all the incoming links you have. But try the same check on alltheweb.com and you might see many more links. You can also search using "+www.yoursite.+com" in Google and see if you get more results. Cheers!

[egomaniac]

> I am only interested in seeing which sites link to me. How do I do this?

There is no Google search command to do specifically what you want. Many webmasters here would like such a feature.

[Hagstrom]

> I am only interested in seeing which sites link to me. How do I do this?

"widget.com" -site:widget.com

[Susanne]

"widget.com" -site:widget.com
This command will give you both sites that link to you and sites that mention your URL but without being linked.

[Hagstrom]

True - it's not perfect. And like the link-command it doesn't give you all the links. :(

[Mohamed_E]

> I am only interested in seeing which sites link to me. How do I do this?

With a *nix system, or even a Win system with *nix utilities (my setup) it is quite easy (at least for those familiar with regular expressions):

1. Google advanced serach, set results to 100 per page.

2. Do link: search

3. Go to end of last page and click on "repeat the search with the omitted results included."

4. "Save As" the page or pages returned, I use type "Web Page, HTML only".

5. Now comes the fun part, as Google periodically changes the format of the results. I just want to save the URL and the TITLE as anchor. Currently the result is preceded by a <p class=g>, I use sed to replace that with a <li> starting on a new line. Also put all <br> tags on a new line, this puts the URL plus anchor on a line of its own.

6. Use grep on output to get lines starting with <li>, since there are no <li>'s in the original that only gets the lines where you have put it, i.e. the ones you want.

7. Do a grep -v yourURL to exclude internal links.

Basically the same approach (different sed commands) can be used to get the links returned by alltheweb into the same format, if you sort both files by URL you can compare the results. Note that alltheweb does not give internal links, also gives external links to all your pages.

Definitely complicated if you are not intimately familiar with regular expressions, quite easy to modify as Google modifies format if you are.