Who’s Linking to Your Site? - Information Trapping: Real-Time Research on the Web - page 89

a Quick Quer y Over view
in the last chapter i noted that iguring out your search queries for internal information searching
wasn't that tough. And it isn't. But let's talk about queries for just a moment. the most obvious
query is your domain name, complete with the www, such as www.example.com. to monitor links
to all pages on your domain, for the most part you have to monitor links to only one urL—your
basic domain urL (in this case, www.example.com). that's because most search engines that ind
links will ind any link to a given domain. For example, if i searched technorati for www.example.
com, i would ind links to www.example.com. i would also ind links to www.example.com/
archive/oldnews.html, or links to www.example.com/really/old/archives/news.html.
For rss feeds it's equally simple; use the urL for your site's main rss feed. if you have more than
one rss feed (some sites have hundreds of rss feeds), it might be amusing to see what kind of
attention the other ones are getting, but it can rapidly get out of hand. in my experience, the
main feed, not a category or additional feed, is what most readers turn to. stick with that one.
Google
To track who's linking to your site in Google, you need to use the link syn-
tax like this:
link:http://www.cnn.com
Unfortunately, Google's link syntax does not work with any other keywords
or any other syntax. So you can't do a query like this:
link:http://www.cnn.com site:edu
to ind all pages from the .edu domain that link to CNN.com. (You can do
that with Yahoo, as you'll see in a minute.) In addition, Google's link syntax
checks the exact URL you're looking for—it doesn't ind all pages within
that domain that are being linked to.
Google's strengths lie in the fact that it updates its index fairly frequently, so
you can pick up a lot of fresh links from its database. But you'll have a lot of
links to pore through and you'll have to do a lot of the organizing yourself.
Yahoo
Because it can use other syntax and keywords in conjunction with the link
syntax, Yahoo is a great way to track not only how many pages are linking