Find out how many sites REALLY link to you in Google
by Sapphire (May 19, 2005)
Thanks to pmkpmk at WebMasterWorld for this great tip!
As you may have noticed, when you check your backlinks at the search engines, Yahoo, MSN and others show a lot more for you than Google does. This is because Google is terribly picky about what links it will count, which presumably delivers better results for searchers. But Google is actually aware of ALL your backlinks, whether it shows them or not, and there’s a simple command you can use to check.
The normal command for checking backlinks is:
link:mysite.com
That will only show the links Google counts as your backlinks. But to see all the backlinks, you need to use:
link|mysite.com
Don’t just copy and paste that, because the pipe symbol may not translate and then it won’t work. What you want to do is replace the colon ( : ) from the original command with a pipe ( | ) symbol from your keyboard. The pipe symbol is on the same key as the backslash (at least on my keyboard) when you hit Shift. It’s just a straight vertical line, broken or unbroken, depending on your system.
Note: if you bring up over 1,000,000 irrelevant results, you may need to add in the www.
This will show EVERY site backlinking to you, and believe me, it makes for some interesting reading.
Posted in SEO
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August 22nd, 2006 at 10:38 pm
Thats a nice secret. But i thought that the links they are not showing is not counted but just droping from the results to make sure that manipulation is difficult. So we dont know which link is really good in google’s sharp eyes
August 22nd, 2006 at 10:39 pm
That’s right. The “link:mysite.com” command shows you which links they count, but it’s only updated periodically. So you never know if a backlink is helping you or not until there’s an update.
What I like about this feature is that it let me see some backlinks that didn’t even show up in my site stats. There were sites linking to mine that I didn’t know about.