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There are many ways to find links on search engines.  The most common is the typical “link:domain.com” or, in the case of Yahoo: “linkdomain:domain.com.”

But, there are other ways you can enhance these queries to make them even better at filtering the good from the bad and ugly.

In this article I look at some ways to modify these queries to find quality authority sites to help improve your link popularity.

The tactic I’m about to explain works best in Yahoo! but I’m sure the list of links you find will be transferable to Google.  In other words, the query works in Yahoo! better than Google but you will still get high quality links that Google will recognize.

Typically, one of the first places one starts when building links is to got to Google and use the “link:domain.com” query.  This will show you many of the links pointing to a domain in Google.  According to the search engine, they put no emphasis or weight on any of the displayed links and in fact only display a random sample of the sites linking.

So really, the Google backlink query is somewhat useless from a link building perspective.  This is where Yahoo! comes in.

Yahoo! has been very kind to webmasters, SEO’s and link builders.  They have several developer API’s and have opened up tools like Site Explorer to help us even more.

But, even with these tools it can be tricky finding good quality links in Yahoo!

Until now, that is.

You see, Yahoo! offers greater flexibility in how you format the queries.  In other words, while “linkdomain:domain.com” will show you all the links to a given domain, you could further refine that query to make it even more useful.

Let’s say you wanted to find out how many links to a domain are from related domains.  For example, let’s say Joe the plumber wants to find out how many links he has from other similar sites.  He could use the following query:

“linkdomain:joesdomain.com plumbing”

This query will show Joe all the links pointing to his site either from other plumbing sites, or also those sites that use the phrase “plumbing” in and around his link.

And, of course since he can do this for his own site, he can do it for competitors.

In other words, he could use the query “linkdomain:joescompetitor.com plumbing” to find those sites linking to his competitor where the link has the text “plumbing” in or around the link.

This is a very effective intelligence gathering query, but also a great way to find new sources of links.

But wait, it gets even better.

Let’s say Joe wants to find only the creme of the crop.  Let’s say there are certain links he wants to find from a specific type of site.

If Joe knows that the best links are educational sites, for example, he could do a “linkdomain:joescompetitor.com inurl:edu” and it would return all links pointing to his competitor’s site that are from educational domains.

And, while this is great, there could be many non-relevant links which Joe’s competitor doesn’t get a lot of credit for.  For example, Joe’s competitor may have donated money to the institution’s sports team and therefore received mention on the monthly newsletter.  Even though it’s a link from an EDU site, that link isn’t worth as much.

So how does Joe find out which are the best links from a given source?

He would simply combine the above two queries.

For example, if Joe wanted to find out all the EDU sites linking to his competitor with the term “plumbing” nearby, he would query like this:

“linkdomain:joescompetitor.com plumbing inurl:edu”

This query would return all the competitor’s links from EDU domains with the phrase “plumbing” in or around the link.  And, you could use similar queries for government sites (inurl:gov) as well as regionalized links (ie. Inurl:co.uk).

The variety and types of links you can find using such a query is limitless.  Then, like always, once you’ve gathered a list of potential links you can approach them for a similar link to your site.

So, if you’ve become frustrated with the typical link building research, why not try this on for size?  I’m sure you’ll be amazed with the results.

Rob Sullivan is a SEO Consultant and Writer for Textlinkbrokers.com. Textlinkbrokers is the trusted leader in building long term rankings through safe and effective link building. Please provide a link directly to Textlinkbrokers when syndicating this article