This is SEO tip number 33 in our continuing series of Search Engine Optimization tips. All of these search engine optimization tips are meant to be specific in nature, they will not take that long to review, and are directly to the point. This search engine optimization tip has to do with finding deep links to a web site using Yahoo.
When searching for links to a web site, it is important to go to Yahoo! and search there. Google, on purpose, does not show you all the links that they know about to a web site. Bing.com also does not choose to show us links to web sites (although they used to). Yahoo! is currently the only search engine of the top 3 major search engines that is perfectly happy with showing us all of the links that they know about a web site.
The search operator you’ll want to use at Yahoo! (this only works at Yahoo!, by the way) is the linkdomain: search. So, when at Yahoo!, search for this:
linkdomain:vizioninteractive.com -site:vizioninteractive.com
Where ‘vizioninteractive.com’ is the domain name that you want to find the links for; we put in a -site:vizioninteractive.com because we do not want to see the links from vizion.flywheelsites.com to themselves.
The “linkdomain” part shows us ALL of the links to that domain name, all of the links to all of the web pages on that domain. In the screen capture above, you will see that there are links from forrester.com, which is actually a link to a blog post I wrote. The “linkdomain” part allows you to see that link from forrester.com. If you were do perform a search like this at Yahoo! you would see a different result:
link:https://www.vizion.com
This search operator, the link: search only shows the links to the particular URL that you specify. So, in this case, you would NOT see the link from forrester.com that’s described above:
Note that whenever you use the “link:” search operator, Yahoo! automatically redirects you to the Yahoo! Site Explorer tool. I’ll talk more about Yahoo! Site Explorer in another SEO tip coming up soon. But for now, if you want to do some link building and see your competitors’ links and even the links to your web site and you want to see ALL of the links, even the “deep links” (links to pages on the site as well as links to the home page), then use the “linkdomain” search operator at Yahoo!.
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OlxLIusgjog[/youtube]