Find ALL of Your Backlinks

I’ve never even looked at MSN Search’s WebLog, but for some reason today I did, and I’m glad. They’ve finally integrated the "linkdomain:" command:

Link: and LinkDomain:

We shipped 1.0 with the Link: keyword, which allows you to find pages that link to a single page, ala link:search.msn.com. Weâve added a variation of that, LinkDomain:, which returns pages that link to any page in a given domain. This is a great way for all you bloggers out there to see how many people are linking to you some way some how, and where theyâre linking. For example, to see pages that link into MSN, you just issue the query linkdomain:msn.com.

This is great news. I’ve long felt that MSN gives you the freshest and most comprehensive look at your backlinks, and this command will making sorting through them a bit easier.

For "links at a glance", I prefer Yahoo!, which seems to give backlink results in order of their importance (e.g., your "strongest" backlink is the first one listed).

For you n00bs out there: Google gives just a random sampling of back links and is not a good place to check your links.

Dupe Content, What’s the Deal-i-o?

Well I’ve been tooting my horn about the greatness of article syndication lately, but I’ve failed to highlight one aspect of it that may dampen it’s effectiveness: having the same article syndicated on many sites creates tons of duplicate content.

The implications of this are unclear though. Firstly, there’s a lot of confusion out there as to what a duplicate content penalty is, including if it even exists and how it works. We do know that when Google finds multiple copies of the same exact content, it tends to use the first copy of it (or, sometimes, the copy with the highest PageRank) when delivering results. This is known as the duplicate content penalty.

I am not however convinced that this is a penalty per se. I think of it more like a filter. The term "penalty" seems to imply that a site has done something naughty and needs to be punished in the SERPs, whereas a "filter" aids search quality by dampening the rankings for results that a searcher will probably not find useful.

Even if that issue was settled, it would be unclear if the fact that the pages were filtered/penalized for duplicate content would affect the value of a link from those pages. It is certainly logical to believe that link algorithms are run separate from other algorithms, with the results then aggregated into the overall search algorithm afterward. The short answer: I don’t know.

How this relates to article syndication: if every syndication instance after the first is truly penalized, then even if your article is syndicated 100 times, you will only gain the value from being linked from one of those instances (either the first instance, or the instance on a page with the highest PageRank). But both my instinct and anecdotal evidence tells me that this is not the case. Thoughts, anyone?

‘Link Spam Alliances’ Research Paper

Gary Price of Search Engine Watch Blog has found yet another Stanford research paper [PDF].

In this paper we study how web pages can be interconnected in a spam
farm in order to optimize rankings. We also study alliances, that is,
interconnections of spam farms. Our results identify the optimal
structures and quantify the potential gains. In particular, we show
that alliances can be synergistic and improve the rankings of all
participants.

Seems like old news to me

Geeky White Papers

White papers that relate to link building:

Block Level Link Analysis [PDF] (MSN)

Combining Link and Content Analysis to Estimate Semantic Similarity [PDF] by Filippo Menczer

Filthy Linking Rich And Getting Richer! by Mike Grehan

Lexical and Semantic Clustering by Web Links by Filippo Menczer

The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine by Sergey Brin and Lawrence Page