How to find more backlinks in Google?

use semicolon instead of colon

[Reid]

I just stumbled onto something

when checking site:mysite in google I made a typo and used a semicolon by mistake site;

I got a list of backlinks that i never knew existed.

link; shows the exact same results as site; but different than link:

[kaled]

It seems to be the same as searching for link mysite.com

Kaled.

[Reid]

yeah thats true. also site (without the colon) does the same.

[arras]

"It seems to be the same as searching for link mysite.com"
No! it works it gives my page the real over 2000 links instead the 230 listed .That is a great discovery.

[steveb]

Search for link site.com/directory/ where there are a bunch of pages in /directory/. It won't distinguish. It just shows pages with the domain words and the word link.

[Reid]

I just found another interesting thing here.
I was checking out one of my main competitors backlinks using link;w*w.mycomp.com

among the many backlinks I found one that is not a link, only text w*w.mycomp.com

In the description field w*w.mycomp.com is always highlighted.So really this is a search for w*w.mycomp.com .

unlike allinurl: it is not searching for only results in the url but results on the pages themselves.

maybe not 100% accurate for a backlink count but I bet it is very accurate. The only ones which would not show in this case would be the ones who do not display the url on the page. This is true because I checked my site for this.

So sorry guys, it's not actual backlinks but another tool nonetheless.

[awebguy]

"It seems to be the same as searching for link mysite.com"

Yes. Just look into Cached page and you will find word "link"

[TinkyWinky]

Wow - what a great discovery Reid.

Instead of Google continually telling me I only have 80 backlinks - I actually have 2,300 which is far more accurate!

Wonder how long this little trapdoor lasts....

[kaled]

Instead of Google continually telling me I only have 80 backlinks - I actually have 2,300 which is far more accurate

What it's actually saying is your site is mentioned in those pages.

Try searching for domain.com -site:domain.com

Kaled.

[TinkyWinky]

Yeah true - but as I do very little advertising - and most of the links I checked very briefly are not through jumppages.... then they are links.

I reckon I have about 1800 - 2000 bqacklinks from checking about abd keeping up on the last 6 years of the site being live so not bad.

[Reid]

"It seems to be the same as searching for link mysite.com"
Yes. Just look into Cached page and you will find word "link"

I think the semicolon makes it ignore the word link.

link;w*w.mysite.com only returns results for w*w.mysite.com

[awebguy]

reid,

try a search for: www.mysite.com;link

i have completely the same result as for
link;www.mysite.com

[Vec_One]

My site appears to have been removed from the Google index, probably because it was hijacked. I now get the following strange results:

www.mysite.com = 0 results
site:www.mysite.com = 0 results
site www.mysite.com = 8,450 results

What's up with that?

[Zygoot]

Strange very strange.

- link;www.mysite.com gives me three times as many results as link:
- but link;http://www.mysite.com gives me 2.5 times less

[kaled]

Google treats punctuation as white space. For instance if you search for "[e-mail]" (with quotes) it will be treated as "mobydick whales com".

Kaled.

[communitynews]

kaled is correct and this entire thread appears to be built on the mistaken assumption that it is something new. People are seeing the results of a search for "site domain.com" when entering "site;domain.com".

Sorry, but it appears that nothing has been discovered here.

[g1smd]

I pointed this out a year ago...

in that case it was "try searching for @www.domain.com or similar" instead.

It's a "feature".

>> link: 12 -- link; 26 -- @ 31

[oodlum]

It's still a usefull and often forgotten method to find backlinks. I didn't know I was in the Open Directory!

[kamran mohammed]

Hello everybody....

I have seen the new discovery by one of the member.

Wel as i have observed the results.

i m surprised to see that..one of my site is launched recently just one months ago & the point is there was no backlink update happened in this mean time....

but when i m searching with the,

link;www.mysite.com ---- 1 result
link:www.mysite.com----- no result
@www.mysite.com ----- 8 results

This google search command means something,
because it is showing different result for diff search commands. May be the result what google is showing..will be our backlinks after the backlink update.....or this are the backlinks what google is hiding....as they do that always.

wel whatever it is; it makes sense......

Ragards,

KaMran :-)

[awebguy]

search result for @www.mysite.com is equal to "www.mysite.com"

[Pradyumna]

Hi Everybody,

I could see something new here that as i use link; it displays the sites which have actual url i type, as what i could conclude out of my results, directory submission's would have great relevance to the site.

Is it true

[Vec_One]

search result for @www.mysite.com is equal to "www.mysite.com"

This is not correct. When I search for www.mysite.com, I get 0 results. When I search for @www.mysite.com, I get 10,600 results.

[paleolith]

It does appear that if you enter just a domain name (say, www.example.com), Google treats it specially. When I tried it just now, Google responded by asking whether I want to search for the term or to list pages linked from that site. Putting an @ in front breaks this special treatment -- the @ is treated as white space but Google just does an ordinary search.

One thing that's often misunderstood is that "link:" is a search for links to a page, not to an entire site: link:example.com only finds links to the home page. (It appears that Google treats link:example.com/index.html as equivalent to link:example.com.) Thus if you want to find links to site example.com, "link:example.com" will not do what you want. This is documented but it's confusing, and because it generally doesn't do what most people want, it's often misunderstood.

I have not found any way to search for terms within a link, thus the only way to find all links to a site is to search for the site name as an ordinary search term. And as others have pointed out several times here, either a semicolon or a space after the word "link" makes it just a search term instead of a type specifier. (The semicolon is true white space; it does not make the terms part of a phrase like some punctuation marks do.) The fact that probably the vast majority of web sites now have the word "link" in the HTML head section means that it has little effect. Still, you are better off searching for just the site name as a term and defeating the special Google treatment described above.

Edward

[Lorel]

Google doesn't report all the links. I've been tracking google links vs Yahoo links on about 25 sites I manage for the last year and with every backlink update the amount reported was decreased until the last one was less than 10% of what yahoo reports.

So take whatever Google says x10 and you should get a roundabout number of actual links.

Better yet--just ask Yahoo.