Checking Backlinks with Yahoo Site Explorer

Note: Yahoo Site Explorer no longer exists, but I’m leaving this post here for the sake of…well…I just don’t want to delete it.

Google is less than forthcoming when it comes to checking backlinks with the link: command. Their data is generally incredibly outdated and incomplete, and probably with good reason (I assume they want you to use webmaster tools to check your own backlinks, and their web spam team probably doesn’t really want you to build links by checking the backlinks of your competitors). Thankfully, Yahoo gives us a great way to check backlinks for any site on the internet.

Basic Yahoo Backlink Checking Syntax

The best way to check backlinks in Yahoo is with the linkdomain: command, which will show backlinks for your entire domain.

You use the linkdomain command like this:

linkdomain:mysite.com

While that is pretty good on its own, if you spend much time looking through the results, you’ll notice that internal links are also listed, and that isn’t really helpful.

To remove internal links from the results, you just have to tell Yahoo to ignore them. You can do that with the -site:mysite.com command. So if you wanted to see all backlinks for a site without the internal links listed, the entire command would be:

linkdomain:mysite.com -site:mysite.com

Removing Specific Domains from Backlink Search

Just as you can remove your own site from the backlink search by using the -site: command, you can also remove any site of your choosing from the results. This is especially helpful if you have some sitewide links from certain sites that are clogging up your results and making them difficult to weed through.

The syntax here is exactly the same as above, but note that you can remove inbound links from more than one site at a time:

linkdomain:mysite.com -site:mysite.com -site:linkingdomain1.com -site:linkingdomain2.com

Removing Backlinks from Pages with a Particular Keyword Phrase

While it may not sound particularly useful to remove results based on keyword phrase, I have found many good uses for it. For instance, I have had some entries scraped, or syndicated around the internet that resulted in hundreds of backlinks, all with the same title. So if I wanted to see the backlinks without that title in the results, I would use:

linkdomain:mysite.com -intitle:the syndicated title

You can also choose to remove backlinks that have certain words in the URL with:

linkdomain:mysite.com -inurl:keyword