francis
22nd Apr 2004, 07:45 am
I was reading the latest High Rankings Advisor and they mentioned that Google's link: filter isn't that great. For those who don't know, link: is supposed to tell you which sites link to yours. There's a theory that Google don't list sites on a :link with a pagerank less than 4.
Whatever the truth of that, HR recommend this syntax instead:
www.yoursite.com -site:www.yoursite.com
which will search for your site's URL but strip out any internal links in your site. This is another area where :link falls down - it lists links actually in your site. Have a look at these examples:
BUPA with :link (http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&safe=off&c2coff=1&q=link%3Awww.bupa.co.uk&btnG=Search) - loads of links to and from bupa.co.uk (789 results)
BUPA using the -site: syntax (http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&safe=off&c2coff=1&q=www.bupa.co.uk+-site%3Awww.bupa.co.uk&btnG=Search). The top result is a subdomain, but other than that it seems free of bupa.co.uk. And the results have shot up to 6,770 pages
Whatever the truth of that, HR recommend this syntax instead:
www.yoursite.com -site:www.yoursite.com
which will search for your site's URL but strip out any internal links in your site. This is another area where :link falls down - it lists links actually in your site. Have a look at these examples:
BUPA with :link (http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&safe=off&c2coff=1&q=link%3Awww.bupa.co.uk&btnG=Search) - loads of links to and from bupa.co.uk (789 results)
BUPA using the -site: syntax (http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&safe=off&c2coff=1&q=www.bupa.co.uk+-site%3Awww.bupa.co.uk&btnG=Search). The top result is a subdomain, but other than that it seems free of bupa.co.uk. And the results have shot up to 6,770 pages