Finding inbound links

Our comment last time regarding search engine commends (the site: command; read about it here) had people asking what other commands were available. Well, here's another one that allows you to see who is linking to you.

The link: command can be used with your website address like this

link:emerg-in.com

and it returns all of the pages that the search engine has indexed that contain a link to your site.

While it works on Google as you would expect there is a need for you to validate your site on Yahoo! and Bing! don't offer support for that command at present.

It's particularly useful if you want to see who are linking to your competitors sites. Because we know that inbound links are good for search engine ranking you should ensure they also link to your site too.