One of the RSS feeds I subscribe to is SEOposition and today I learned something new. It was a short entry about how you know you can see how many backlinks using Google. If you never knew, you can do it by typing this in the Google search bar.
link:websitename.com
According to Brian from SEOposition, he says this only gives a partial list of URLs linking to your site and is by no means a comprehensive look at your total number of backlinks. However, in his article View Google Backlinks in Google he’s shared another method which he feels Google may have accidentally allowed users to use.
If I wanted to find out about how many of my pages are indexed on Google, I could type this in the search bar:
site:websitename.com
But in order to somewhat accurately search for the number of backlinks using Google, Brian shared you could type this in the search bar:
site:.com websitename.com -site:websitename.com
You’re using the format “site:.com” because what you’re telling the Google search to do is define my search results in relation to only domains with a “.com”. Therefore, if you changed this to “.org” or “.net” you will be generate results filtered based on websites using those generic top-level domain.
And remember, the websitename.com should be replaced with your own URL.
As Brian mentioned, there is a high possibility Google may pick this up and remove it entirely so if you want to give it a try, better do it before that happens.
By using the above, I found some weird findings.
- Discussion of my How much does a WordPress template cost? entry in a forum I didn’t know about.
- A domain name pointing to my entry. And I don’t own the domain name. (Not linking that)
All I can say is give this a try and make sure you go scan through the URLs of the results as you may discover findings like mine. Let me know if you found anything interesting in the comments.
[tags]Google tools, Google backlinks, Website backlinks, SEO tip[/tags]