Can you really check backlinks anymore
- 18th Apr 2008
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- Dave
I think the big 3 search engines have done a great job at stopping normal SEO’s and web masters checking out back links.
First off Live.com well they just pulled the link: and linkdomain: a while ago, hopefully they will add it into the webmaster.live.com
Google hasn’t for years shown real link data and yahoo show’s nofollow links and historical links that have been removed months and months ago..
so let’s look at some numbers for www.davidnaylor.co.uk which we can get
Google Webmastercentral returns 34,903
Google “link:www.davidnaylor.co.uk” 1,730 pages
Google “davidnaylor.co.uk” = 9,560 pages ( shows occurrences )
Yahoo siteexplorer UK version Inlinks (8,348)
Yahoo siteexplorer US version Inlinks (134,594)
Yahoo search for davidnaylor.co.uk -davidnaylor.co.uk returns 1500 ( shows occurrences -my site )
Of course you can only get around 1000 results unless you are the site owner, so what can we use other than the commercial competitive analysis tools like Hitwise, Syntryx etc etc ..
DaveN
5 Comments | Leave a comment »
Well said…
but you’re not mixing this up with Yahoo changing their result pages in site explorer today that caused us some fiddling on our tools today, do you?
maybe they are running different versions (of backlink databases) as well on UK/US these days?
We have seen at least THREE different html result versions for site explorer result pages today, not to mention the mess they have on the “old” result pages for complex backlink queries
have a good one!
Christoph
Not that it’s 100% reliable either, but here’s the search query I’ve been using for a couple of years to search backlinks at Google:
“www.davidnaylor.co.uk” -site:www.davidnaylor.co.uk
Dave,
Have you tried linkdiagnosis? it uses US Yahoo data but it goes through every page on your site so it does not limit to 1000 links for your site but for 1000 links per page, if you know what I mean. Also my tool eliminates sitewide links so you will get much less links on it than there is a total count on yahoo.
Alexa does extensive web crawling, data which feeds the Internet Achieve Wayback machine.
From this crawling, Alexa offers data on incoming links both through a public interface (which says you have 373 links:
http://www.alexa.com/data/ds/linksin/davidnaylor.co.uk )
and through an API, http://www.amazon.com/gp/browse.html?node=12782661
While not the definitive answer, Alexa is a source of potentially useful info.
By the way, I see Alexa is “now aggregate(ing) data from multiple sources” when deriving ranking data (which was formally limited to toolbar derived data): http://awis.blogspot.com/2008/04/alexa-ranking-system-has-been-changed.html
Unfortunately, they don’t clarify what these new data sources are; since they say they are reprocessing historical data; one wonders if they have just changed geographic weighting or some other fudge factors? Any readers have info on this?
Janusz- awesome tool!
DC