Who’s Linking to Your Site? - Information Trapping: Real-Time Research on the Web - page 92

linking to you and linking to a competitor? (You can do two link searches in
one query!) Once you begin using other syntax and keywords in conjunction
with a link or linkdomain search, the possibilities are (almost) endless.
Say you're the CEO of Example.com and you want to monitor which sites
are linking to you and linking to CNN.com. hat's easy—your search would
look like this:
link:http://www.example.com link:http://www.cnn.com
Or say you've got a blog and you want to know how many college Web pages
are linking to you. In this case, you'd enter:
link:http://www.example.com site:edu
Or what if you want to know who's linking to you but mentioning the name
of your competitor? You'd enter this in the query box:
link:http://www.example.com WidgetCo
Remember, you want complete but manageable!
If you can think of keywords that are at all relevant, try to use them; nar-
rowing down your results is important. Excluding your own domain from
the results helps, such as in the following example:
linkdomain:www.example.com -site:example.com
WarninG
keep in mind that the link syntax and the linkdomain syntax will
not work if you include http:// in front of the urL.
Using Yahoo's RSS feeds
Yahoo ofers RSS feeds of its search results, but you have to enter the URL
yourself. So, for example, you'd enter the following URL and then substi-
tute your query for the word keyword at the end:
http://api.search.yahoo.com/WebSearchService/rss/webSearch.
xml?appid=yahoosearchwebrss&query=keyword.
You'll ind more information about Yahoo Web RSS feeds, and the encod-
ing options for them, in the next chapter. Seeing who's linking to you across
the entire Web is useful, but it does have its limitations. You might get the
same results and ind that the same pages are indexed over and over, or you
might miss some of the more minor links to your pages.