Predict link amount based on public "link:"

[bad1]

Hello,

Is there any way to predict overall amount of current links based on data, shown by Google through “link” operator? Webmaster Console is no good, that’s not my web site :) Moreover, I don’t need to know exactly who is linking to my competitors, I just want to weight – roughly, overall amount of their inbound links, and sadly I can't use Yahoo.

Thank you,
A.J.

[tedster]

I'm afraid the answer is no. Google's public link: operator numbers are all over the place, shifting from month to month and not even showing similar ratios across websites at any one time.

[bad1]

tedster, thank you. I'll try to find out other ways :)

[Marcia]

Yahoo Site Explorer:

linkdomain:example.com

[Pico_Train]

Or sign for the webmaster tools account and add your site there, you get a link report for your site there that is accurate.

[tedster]

Right, Pico_Train, that works for your own site -- but the OP said it's not their site - so that option is out.

[bad1]

Everyone, thanks for your replies, but tedster got it right - I know about Yahoo, and can't use it, as well as Google WM tools. Imagine, you have a competitor with network of sites, which robots.txt looks like this:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /
User-agent: Googlebot
Allow: /

See what I mean? :) All I need is just to evaluate the size of such network.

[Pico_Train]

oh sorry! Wasn't paying attention as I read along!

[Pico_Train]

You can try things like this too that could help:

inurl:www.sitename.com
inurl:sitename.com

standard search for www.sitename.com - that's pretty good but will be labour intensive.

Good luck!