Who’s Linking to Your Site? - Information Trapping: Real-Time Research on the Web - page 90

to your site but also what kinds of pages are linking to your site. Yahoo
ofers two syntax for tracking page links:

. Link syntax. Use the link syntax when you want to ind sites that are
linking to one speciic page of yours. You use this syntax just like you
would with Google: link:http://www.cnn.com .

Linkdomain. Use linkdomain when you want to ind all the pages that
are pointing to a particular domain, instead of just one page. he syntax
looks like this: linkdomain:www.cnn.com . Note that you do not use http://
with this syntax; if you do it will fail and you won't get any results.

.

Yahoo also makes a tool available for getting information about sites that
are linking to a given URL; it's called Site Explorer.

Yahoo's Site explorer
Instead of using query words to search, start using Site Explorer (siteex-
plorer.search.yahoo.com/) by typing in a simple URL, such as the URL for
your Web site. When you do that, Yahoo gives you a results page with a list
of the pages from that domain which Yahoo has indexed. (hat's good to
know; the more pages from your domain that Yahoo has indexed, the easier
it will be for other people to ind your site.) he full number of pages will be
at the top of the results list. Beside that number is the number of pages that
Yahoo has indexed that link to the URL you speciied, with a hyperlink so
that you can see the list ( Figure 6.1 ).

Unfortunately, Yahoo only lets you see the irst 1,000 results from each list,
which is frustrating if you have more than a few thousand links to your site
because you know you're missing most of them. Yahoo does ofer the abil-
ity to export the results into a text ile that can be opened in Excel, but you
get the results ity at a time (in other words, if you want to export a list of
a thousand pages that link to your site, you'll have to export a list of results
twenty times).

It doesn't appear that Yahoo Site Explorer lists its site links in order of date,
so you can't easily monitor the results list for new additions. However, you
can monitor the irst results page and watch how the numbers at the top of
the screen change—that is, you can keep track of the count of pages linking
to your URL, and the count of pages indexed by Yahoo.com.