Everyone knows or at least should know about the use of the link command in search engines to find out how many pages are linking to your website. This is very useful for determining the number of potential routes into your website. But there is a basic flaw with this command. It only gives you the links pointing to the paticular page you search for in the query. The format is such as link:http://www.someDomain.com. This will give you a number of links pointing to your main page, but it will not tell you which sites link to www.someDomain.com/page1.html.
Now this command is useful and I use it all the time. Since we know page rank is calculated by the number of incoming links you have to a particular page, it is useful to know this information so you can predict what your page rank will be on the next Google Page Rank update.
Each page is a potential entry point into your site, so its useful to know how many links are indexed in the search engine which someone may use to find their way into your site. This is where linkdomain comes in handy. The format for the linkdomain comand is linkdomain:www.somedomain.com. And this will show you all external links listed to any page in your website. This lets you know the breadth and depth of your link position. This can be very useful information. One thing that is best when you use this command is to get rid of the links from your own site. You can do this by appending -site:www.SomeDomain.com to the linkdomain query as it will take out all your own pages. One good use for this is so you which of your pages have the highest concentration of external links. This will tell you which page may get the best page rank( this may not be relevant as one PR7 link will give a page a PR6 on update) on the next Google update. Unfortunatley the linkdomain command is not available in Google so you can only use it in Yahoo and MSN, but that really does not make a difference as you should be checking links in those SE’s anyway and not Google since Google never gives accurate results in showing the number of backlinks to a domain.
More importantly, this will let you see which pages are the most popular and the ones that people are linking to the most. This tells two things. One, these sites with the highest number of links are the mostly likely to rank the highest in the search engines for their keywords and they have the potential to be the entry pages for your website. Two, this information will allow you to optimize those pages in order to maximize revenue or to provide a sticky effect to the rest of your site.
