ComTech News

Well Microsoft just did something really cool for search engine marketers and web masters. They just introduced a new command that you can use to research a website’s link structure. The command LinkFromDomain:domain.com (of course replace domain.com with the domain you want to research).

Doing so will produce a list of all the outbound links MSN has indexed from the domain in question.

Here is an example of this for Comtech News, ComTech News Out Links on MSN. So this show you everyone a site links to vs. everyone linking to a site as with the old command of, linkdomain:domain.com.

Now right on the surface there are some cool uses for this command. Such as if you want to know whom that number one ranked site on Google is linking to and compare it to whom links to them then Google is not your answer. First they won’t show you the out links and second they have been only showing a small portion of back links for a very long time. So in essence this is a great way to look into not only MSNs algorithm but that of Google, Yahoo and even Ask.com as well. Live.com may not be becomming the dominant search engine but it is sure turning into “the source” for competitive data.

Another interesting use is just to take sites you manage, plug them in and see what shows up. Doing so may show you some old links you forgot about that are dated and need to come down or be directed elsewhere. Over time a site grows large and many older sections get forgotten, odds are this will find some broken links, changed target pages, etc and help you do some occasional “spring cleaning”.

Most people would not look deeper then that, but most people are not SEOs fully aware of the real black hat world such as we are! Most people still think black hats are guys using hidden text, key word stuffing and link farms. Well, that is old news and black hats are smarter then the average Joe, this is one way to see if some of the more evil among them have targeted you.

So, what do I mean?

Simple one very little known technique for getting links that the vile scum of internet marketing will employ is placing hidden links on your website to sites they want to optimize. How do they do this? There are a variety of ways but they include writing malicious scripts to find sites with security holes in them and then hacking in and placing a link or several links where they won’t be seen. A sleaze ball working for a web host who collects passwords and usernames or a sleazy scumbag web designer who worked on a site in the past. Honestly there are many ways (more then I can think of) that people can gain access to your site and hide links. This new LinkFromDomain command is a great way to find such links!

How do they hide them?

Well they may simply create a small 1-pixel image that matches a background by color and place it on a page in a blank area and link the image. Most site owners would never see this. Or they could even hack into some of your content including your style sheet and create a style that makes links look like any other text, then tool around and find terms in your content and create links in areas you don’t change often. No one would see them as a link unless they hovered over the word. In a large site many such links could be buried and it could take years for them to be found.

There are more but I think you get the point! I wish Microsoft would add a way to see what page of you site was providing the link, if they are smart they will. Doing so would win them even more friends in the SEO and web design world.

Now here is something you really need to be aware of to use this function properly and find any scum links in your sites.

The biggest offenders in this world are “adult sites”, read that porn. So if you want to really see everything that your site is linking to make sure you click on “options” at the top of the search results and turn off filtering, if you don’t you won’t see any links to adult content and those scummy links won’t be found.

To me this command could become the salesperson’s or consultant’s best friend, when meeting with a client. If you can find such scummy links and inform a new prospective client about them on their site you will go a long way toward gaining their trust and their business. This is sure one way to cut the legs out from under a less informed competitor.

So are there any other uses for this command that you can think of? To me there is a whole cookie jar to be explored here,

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