IndustryWindows Live Search Adds linkfromdomain Command

Windows Live Search Adds linkfromdomain Command

Windows Live Search has added a new linkfromdomain command designed to show
you all the sites that a particular domain links to. For example, want to see
all the sites we link to off the Search Engine Watch Blog? Do this:


linkfromdomain:blog.searchenginewatch.com

Well, that’s supposed to work. Right now, it doesn’t. I suspect there’s an
issue with subdomains. Instead, I have to use the root domain of
searchenginewatch.com, like this:


linkfromdomain:searchenginewatch.com

Windows Live Search has other link-related commands, and they explain more
about these in the

Search Macros: LinkfromDomain
post on the Live Search blog today, completely
with color-coded chart. I’ll run through them as well.

Want to know who links to a particular domain, such as the US White House
site? Use the linkdomain command, like this:


linkdomain:whitehouse.gov

As Windows Live explains, you can use the two commands together to see who
links to each other. For example, want to see all the links from one site to
another site, such as from Search Engine Watch to TechCrunch? Use the
linkfromdomain command in combination with the site command, like this:


linkfromdomain:searchenginewatch.com site:techcrunch.com

That brings up 172 links? How about the reverse? Easy:


linkfromdomain:techcrunch.com site:searchenginewatch.com

That brings up 81 links. Unfortunately, I don’t see a way to know exactly
what specific page at one site links to that at another. Nor does it seem
possible to see reciprocal links. In other words, the commands don’t allow you
to see which exact pages between two sites may link to each other. Hey, a boy
can hope, can’t he? Note that the page specific link: command might allow this
— I just haven’t had a chance yet to find two pages I know link to each other
to try it.

Last year, Microsoft
rolled out
something related that was long on my wish list, the inanchor command. It allows
you to find pages that have links to them containing certain words. For example:


inanchor:miserable

Should be all the pages that have the word “miserable” in a link pointing at
them. Unfortunately, you can’t do multiple words. That means this won’t work:


inanchor:”miserable failure”

Or at least it shouldn’t according to the

instructions
. Instead, that’s supposedly processed like this:

inanchor:miserable failure

Which should mean show all the pages that have links pointing at them
containing the word “miserable” which also themselves have the word failure on
them. The problem is, several of the pages clearly do NOT say failure on them,
so it doesn’t seem to be working correctly.

My real wish is to be able to see all the pages using certain words in links
to other pages. That would allow us to finally see, for example, all the pages
linking to the US White House and saying “miserable failure” in the links,
helpful for those trying to understand
this and
other link bombs.

Link domain sort of allows this:


linkdomain:whitehouse.gov inanchor:miserable

That shows you all the links saying the word “miserable” and linking to the
whitehouse.gov domain. Or at least it should show. I doubt it’s working
correctly, because it reports only 189 links. There are many, many more links
like this out there.

Similarly, this doesn’t seem to work to give you a page-specific report:


link:whitehouse.gov/president/gwbbio.html inanchor:miserable

It reports the same 189 links, suggesting there’s no difference between it
and the linkdomain command, which I’ve already said isn’t working.

Microsoft has many more commands you can play with as listed

here
. There’s also a special form you can use to play more with the new
linkfromdomain commands

here
.

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