Today you at least get a normal search screen with no results,
but I remember that they had a “blank page” as result for WEEKS when you used those “forbidden” operators

I realize products change, and so do operators.

But this product line armageddon – first to talk big about cool new features and then break everything over night just made me think

I remember MSNdude bragging last summer about their “HUGE” infrastructure and all the shit they are able to do with it that Google and Yahoo cannot… LOL

I bet somebody found that the shared dipped some cents, so they sold some search server machines to generate fake-profits …

What’s going on those minds?

With this command you can easily extract linkage data the search engines got that you cannot get easily in another way (unless of course you spider websites with your own robots, which some existing scripts and tools have to do …

First some thanks to Todd Marcus Aaron and Graywolf via the Threadwatch Community for pointing me to this feature some days ago – I definately forgot about posting about my ideas the last 2 days…

So – MSN LinkFromDomain – is this fancy new rocket science technology as one reader stated?

NO WAY … Search engines got the web index spidered already since their first introduction of link based algorithms… the novel thing is that MSN is revealing this additional information (in addition to the backlinks) to the public.

Now what’s that new command useful for?

Just some ideas off the top of my head – I found some others having similar ideas and will reference to them

1. Bad neighborhood linkage analysis

everybody’s talking bad neighborhood linking – but how can YOU really find out where-to a site is linking to? Spider all of the site’s pages and even take a look at all those small
footer links and maybe even hidden links that only SEngs see and furthermore check all the domains in Google, Yahoo, MSN ?

No more needed – linkfromdomain:site.com and you see where they link out to … of course in case of Google this can be quite a lot

“Russ Jones of Virante” already launched a quick tool already for finding banned sites – it checks the first 100 links in MSN for your site and tells you if they are indexed or NOT by google (an indication of banning). check it out ..

2. Hub analysis is old – do Authority analysis

SEOs look at common inbound link patters to pages the they suspect to be hubs, e.g. using Aarons Hubfinder (that I need to mirror BTW)

The problem: you first need those hub pages you suspect – and probably find them by looking up existing links to authority sites – which again you suspect them to be authorities

so what the HECK is an authority site

Similar to comparing similarities in inbound link patterns for ONE site, you can now go and compare the OUTBOUND link patterns for a couple of sites… and that tool could very easily list a grade of authority by counting how many top ranking sites link out to that found site

WHY would you do that?

WELL, linking out is crucial to your rankings as mentioned by many others – which means you want to find the authorities to link to – and a GOOD PART of the SEO community already knows, understands and DOES this …

So NOW all you have to do is apply a linkfromdomain command to a site and – well – filter the results… actually every corelation of these results with the results of other top ranking sites should give you a GREAT idea of what to look for… Aarons old tool – the hubfinder should be fairly easy to modify to use that

So if LINKING OUT is crucial to your rankings and finding the sites to link out to can be so easy now by having an “authority finder tool” is required (which still has to be developed, I guess Aaron AND/OR Jim are already working on it, especially as Jim already has a related forward link tool ) then the MSN LinkFromDomain command is the key element to it

Sidenote: Googles RELATED: operator gave you some ideas… until they crippled it some months ago – just like the backlink operator

Then looking at common inbound link patterns AND common outbound link patterns in an even more advanced tool will give you great ideas leading to real web graphs.

I’m amazed MSN is giving out so much info.

But then there are some flaws of missing data and even a suspicion of supplemental outbound link SERPs

3. FAST reciprocal link checker

well obviously recip link checking has become a lot easier – at least for that part of the web that MSN has indexed, spidered and is returning data for

You can use this in TWO ways

a) compare all inbound links vs matching outbound links for a domain

b) compare all inbound links vs matching outbound links for a page

So this last one only returns pages that marketingfan.com links out to, that are linking back to the homepage … you could do that with any other target page on your site (e.g. your hidden powerfull product selling page)

Russ again launched a reciprocal link percentage tool that calculates the percentage of reciprocating links for a domain… pretty interesting use

Flaws,Problems,Questions with LinkFromDomain

Some further observations of some linkfromdomain command limitations of the last days

• definately NOT the whole MSN index is retrievable via this command… I found a lot of sites that are ranking fine in MSN, got link pop data leading to PR4-7 in Google that returned NO single result in MSN

• the results seem to be geo-ip based, unless you add some locale-operator… e.g. if I look for Google’s outbound links then I get a ton of austrian sites (.at domain) linked from there… I assume the US guys start with .coms or US based sites

• there’s a suspicion of supplemental outbound link SERPs – meaning some filtered links that MSN won’t show you

• I am still trying to find out is – does it work with wildcards? – I mean some kind of keyword restrictions in those outbound link results

It would be great to have a command like
linkfromdomain:site.com *gambling*
this would be great to list all gambling sites a target site is linking to unless you are in gamling business you don’t want your link there, do you?

(YES: even if it IS a PR8 - who the heck cares about PR anyway???)

Anyway – Thank you MSN for this cool new operator!

PS: sidenote – MSN also got their new “search MACRO” feature that I missed until now… I think that’s one great thing I’ll have to look into next