It's been 12 days since Barry reported at SERoundtable that Live Search's link commands were back online, the only thing you have to do is add a + in front of them. Since they're still working I decided to play around with them a bit. Quite a few nice things came up, so keep reading!
There are a few things which I've noticed and I wanted to share with you:
Sitewides
I don't know if it's always been like this when it worked before, but the way it handles sitewides is awesome:
Nofollows
Live search seems to be the first to not show any backlinks which have nofollow on it at all. That's kinda great, because that means this is now the most reliable link data out there.
API
Perhaps my biggest discovery: if you add the + in front of the query, you can now also get all this data through the API again! I updated my domain info tool to take advantage of that (and fixed that tool completely).
Combinations still work
You can still use link:, linkdomain: and linkfromdomain: in combination with other parameters like site: or -site:, so you can get all the links to a domain, without the internal links, by doing "+linkdomain:example.com -site:example.com".
In all, it rocks that the commands work again, let's hope they don't kill them.
This is awesome news! Thanks for the neat writeup
and thx for fixing the domain info tool ;)
Good tips Joost!
Joost,
Thanks for this tip. I've been missing this option in my Search Status add-on for a long time.
Sorry but these commands are not working, and I've researched it about two full hours, and it doesn't look like these commands are ever going to work again. No matter the plus or what.I t seems totally unfair to people that have the application IDS to not be able to build useful tools ike inlink counter, (of the type I had) the only one that works any more for me is the Yahoo. I never ping Google... Since Live link commands disappeared and XML.Teoma went down? what's the point all u can get is G and Y and I had a mashup of all the foru, no two. Just gonna take it offline.