SEOmoz revealed a very useful search engine trick to find link partners who link to your competitors WITHOUT linking to you.
The search trick uses a special search operator (“linkdomain”) found in MSN and Yahoo. Sorry, Google does not support it. Google can use “link:” to check domain’s incoming links but it does not work in this trick.
Sample search:
The following search string will find websites that link to yahoo.com AND msn.com WITHOUT linking to google.com.
(linkdomain:yahoo.com linkdomain:msn.com) (-linkdomain:google.com)
Bonus: use (intitle:KeyWord) to narraw the search to keywords in page title.
My two cents
This is good trick to find high quality link partners who are linking to your competitors. High quality, because high ranking websites are listed at top of the search result.
However, I found that the results were not so accurate. I guess it is because I am using popular domains to search, and websites update faster than search engines’ cache rate.
[Source: SEOmoz, via sitepoint blog]
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you mean you insert linkdomain:competitordomain.com right?
try link:www.comeptitordomain.com at google
For google
use ->
link:www.xxx.com
Google’s “link:domain.com” checks incoming links to the domain.
Can you check websites that link to competitor websites BUT not link to you, using “link:domain.com” ?
Google’s link:domain.com does not show all incoming links to your website. I think they do this on purpose.
Google link check only shows partial number of links. Google has lots of secrets and this is one of them.