How to assess true number and value of incoming links?

This has become difficult with the spate of Run of Site -ROSes stink :-)

[Macro]

OK, Google's link: command is broken/disabled/fiddled. So, when buying sites, how do you assess the quality of incoming links they've got? You go alltheweb, yahoo etc.

BUT, with the widespread use of Run of Site (ROS) links this is becoming very difficult. A site with 100 good inwards from a variety of different high PR edu/gov sites is undeniably better than one with 10,000 links of which all come from one ROS deal and one forum signature. It is rarely that clear cut though. Comparing two sites with, say 30,000 links and 45,000 links - unless you do some extensive research into where their links are coming from it's difficult to judge them properly.

Is there a way of filtering out the ROS? Is there a way of searching ATW or Yahoo and saying "show me only one link from each site"?

[glengara]

I've noticed Y! will only show X amount of links reported, nearly all the omitted ones are "secondaries" from the same domains.

[Macro]

That's what I thought but Y! seems to be a bit screwed up as well.

examplesite.com has one ROS deal that gives it about 7000 links. Yahoo's "link:" search comes up with a total of "Results 1 - 10 of about 8,640 for...".

Fair enough. So, there are 1640 other links? Not so. If I go to the 13th page of links I see that the last one is link number 158 and I have an option to "repeat the search with omitted results included". So I do that and get "Results 1 - 10 of about 10,900 ..."!

If 10,900 are the total links including the ROS then the original search should have given me 3,900 (10,900 - 7,000) instead of giving me 8,640.

[neuron]

Is there a way of filtering out the ROS? Is there a way of searching ATW or Yahoo and saying "show me only one link from each site"?

I don't think so. However, you might be able to use something like WPG and instead of a regular keyterm use your link:domain.com string. I don't know if it will allow you to go as high as 10,000 returns, but if it does, you would then be able to save the search as a report and the URL of the link would be in it's own field. Export that field or column to Excel or any DB and then use a SQL command to filter out non-unique domains.

[PatrickDeese]

have you tried this in Y?

linkdomain:example.com -site:example.com -site:roslinks.com

etc.

[Macro]

sounds interesting.

I'll replace "example.com" with my URL. What do I replace "roslinks.com" with?

or are you suggesting I find all the sites where they have an ROS deal and then have multiple "-site:sitewithROSlinks.com"?

neuron, please forgive my ignorance - what's WPG? (I tried to Google it without much success.)

[PatrickDeese]

well, in other words, if example.com's backlink results were "contaminated" with run of site links from foobar.com you'd add -site:foobar.com, for ever domain you wanted to exclude from the backlinks list. I think there's a limit of about 7 or so.