Query for checking is a link to domain A already exists on domain B

James77

Hi,

I was wondering if anyone can help. I need to have a simple check where I have 2 domains, and I can check of there are any links from domain A to domain B.

Does anyone what would be the best query for this and if you would use google, bing, yahoo or other SE.

Many thanks

KeriMorgret

Basically, you want to know:

Before I send a link request to this site, I want to check and make sure that I don't already have a link from them.

Is this correct? Just wanting to help rephrase to help you get some more on-target answers here.

James77

Thanks Sebastian,

It's a bit of a conundrum I am having problems solving - essentially it needs to be very quick and not resource intensive. I this case it looks like the search engines don't want to provide the data.

Thanks

coremediadesign

I see - I'm afraid I don't know of any query, which might be used in the search field in order to achieve this and not sure if there is such a query - it would obviously only show the pages that are indexed by the specific search engine rather than all actual pages that the site listed your link on.

Performing the search on all of the pages of the site would be very resource intensive and I'm not sure if there even is such tool available - I believe you could find something if you were pointing to the specific page, but to crawl the entire site - I haven't heard of.

As a workaround (which I know you're not so keen on) what you could do is to crawl the entire site using sitemap generator application - to get all (or at least most) of the pages of the specific site. Once you have all these links exported as .txt you can then process them with the code by looping one by one and checking them with my previous suggestion, but that's all I could think of.

Sorry for not being able to be more of help on this occasion.

James77

Hi Sebastian,

Not quite - I'm actually looking for something simpler than that.

Suppose for example you took your own website (whatever that is) - and you want to find out if there is a link anywhere on SEOMOZ.org to your website.

Is there is simple query you could punch into a search engine to provide a list of result showing all pages on SEOMOZ that have links to your website.

coremediadesign

I think what you're looking for is some regular expression which will return true or false when the specific url has been found within the content of the page - that's obviously if I understood it well.

If so - here's a simple way of achieving this with PHP Simple Html Dom Parser http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2334206/url-matching-using-preg-match-all-in-php-and-regex

Rather than looping through the array you could just check whether it is empty or not - if empty - link wasn't found.

I hope that's what you're looking for.

James77

Close but I don't think correct - Unless I have hundreds of links from the BBC

lury2

google: [link:seomoz.org]&&[site:wikipedia.org]

?

James77

Thats not really what I am after to be honest. For link building I just want a very quick simple query I can punch in a search engine to check if I already have a link on that website.

lury2

well, then you can use services like http://cognitiveseo.com/ which will track your inbound links, and actually provide you with much more data like visual map where is the link - header, content, sidebar, footer and all the other attributes - (no)follow, image, text etc.

afaik campaigns in cognitiveSEO are updated daily.

James77

The problem with open site explorer is that the index only gets updated once a month, so it wouldn't show any links that have been acquired in the current month.