Yesterday, Jill Whalen released her weekly HighRankings Advisor Newsletter. This newsletter generated quite a bit of conversation over at the IHelpYou Forum. Jill stated:

www.yoursite.com -site:www.yoursite.com (Obviously substituting yoursite.com for your actual site.)

This command will show you all the pages linking to yours, minus the pages from your own site. If you want to see your own site links too, just remove the -site:www.yoursite.com part, as that's the syntax for excluding them.

So of course, when someone as well known as Jill in this industry writes something and gives it out to hundreds of people, some have to critique each and every word. It is funny, because Jill clearly stated she wrote the newsletter really quickly because of her upcoming Chicago show. Any how, people do have a right to be upset.

It can easily be construed that one should not use the link: command in Google to find a site's backlink. Jill says, instead you should use www.yoursite.com -site:www.yoursite.com syntax. This however does not give an "accurate" representation of all of a site's backlinks. It does not take into account links to ones sites which are not in the visible body text of the page.

This does however, very accurately bring back the number of links and non links on pages Google has indexed that contain the text www.yoursite.com on a page's visible content only. Again, based on my tests - it does not bring back other type of anchor text, such as <a href="www.mysite.com">keyword phrase</a>. Join the discussion here.

updated: 9:25AM
Over at Cre8asite Forums, they opened up a discussion on the best method, in my opinion, to find ones true backlinks. That is, to use Yahoo! Search and use the syntax "linkdomain:mysite.com", without the www. As most of you know, AllTheWeb was the source for finding the highest number of backlinks to one's site. Now we can use Yahoo! to do the same with this command.

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