As a search engine optimization professional, one of the tools that I got in the habit of using over the past several years has been the un-publicized feature called “link domain”. For years, even though Google eventually turned off the link query at their search engine and made it available to site owners only, and Bing.com eventually turned it off also, Yahoo! always allowed us to use the linkdomain query at Yahoo.com. The query looked liked this:
This query would show you the links to a domain name (including all of the subdomains like www.domain.com, blog.domain.com, etc. etc.). And including -site:domain.com you could exclude certain sites (like the domain linking to itself). You could include even more than one domain in the -site:domain.com, so that you could narrow down the links even further. That’s was especially nice if you wanted to exclude certain links from an entire domain if the domain had a lot of links from one particular domain name.
But just recently, Yahoo! search has just started redirecting the linkdomain search query results to Yahoo Site Explorer. And, the linkdomain:domain.com -site:domain.com search no longer exists. I guess we can chalk this up to one more casualty of the Bing.com/Yahoo.com search alliance that I personally don’t like.
Although the query is being redirected to the Yahoo Site Explorer, the ability to disallow more than one domain name in the query (by adding a -site:domain1.com -site:domain2.com, etc. to the query) is something that we are no longer going to be able to do.
So, most likely, as webmasters and as search engine optimization professionals, we are left to find other ways to monitor our competitors and look for links.
To learn more about what Yahoo is up to, take a look at their recent blog post about important API changes and changes to Yahoo! Site Explorer.
At Bing.com, you might want to use the linkfromdomain query but it doesn’t work the same as the linkdomain search at Yahoo.com did.
