Search Engine Analysis Tools
The big 3 search engines provide handy tools and features to help analyse your sites. These include showing the number of backlinks your site has and the number of pages indexed by the search engine. Learn about the differences in these features below, and keep a record of the changes over time, to see what effect your site optimisation is having.
Note: Google only shows a sample of the backlinks it knows about using the link: feature. For a more detailed view of what sites are linking to you, use Yahoo Site Explorer. Other useful Google features are listed here.
- link:www.url.com - shows a sample of backlinks at Google.
- site:url.com - shows the number of pages in Google’s index for a particular site.
- site:url.com “keyword” – shows pages with a particular term in a particular site.
- url.com -site:url.com - shows the number of pages where the URL is mentioned in Google’s index.
- define:keyword – shows definitions for a keyword, useful for glossary research.
- allinanchor position, allintext position, allintitle position, allinurl position - these unique pieces can be added prior to a search to see how well the URL ranks for just the keyword in anchor text, on-page text, title, etc.
- http://labs.google.com/personalized/siteflavored - shows what theme Google thinks your site has.
Google Webmaster Tools shows more backlinks than the link: feature, and also allows these links to be downloaded into a CSV file.
Yahoo!
Yahoo Site Explorer is a fairly new tool, still in beta, that makes it easy to analyse backlinks and pages indexed. The search codes below can still be used however.
- linkdomain:url.com -site:url.com - shows the number of links Yahoo! knows of to any page at your TLD (not including those on the site itself).
- link:http://www.url.com - shows the number of links Yahoo! knows of to a particular page or the homepage of your site.
- linkdomain:url.com site:tld.com - shows the number of links Yahoo! knows of from a particular domain to another, useful for checking sitewides, etc.
MSN
- link:url.com -site:url.com - shows the number of links MSN knows of to a particular domain, note that MSN does not differentiate between pages & sites with this command (they have no equivalent of Yahoo’s linkdomain).
- link:www.url.com - shows a sample of backlinks at MSN.
- site:url.com - shows the number of pages in MSN’s index for a particular site.
