Search Engine Commands for Link Building

Sometimes an obscure link building technique or advanced query string might be enough to help you find relevant sites that will link back to you. Here are some operator commands and how they can help your business SEO.

Find people who mention your site or brand but aren't linking to you

"your brand name" -linkdomain:www.yourwebsite.com

Basically you are telling the search engine to look for matches with your brand name, then the negative linkdomain operator will include only the results which do not link to your website. Finding the websites that already mention your brand will give you a good list on where to start building links.

Find directories that your competitors are listed in

"add url" linkdomain:www.yourcompetitorswebsite.com

This is a handy little operator to find directories and websites that your competitors are listed in. What you're telling the search engine is to look for any page that has the terms "add url" and are linking to a particular website. You can use different variations including "submit url", "add website" etc

Find sites that have a certain keyword in title

allintitle:"keywords go here"

This is a fairly simple little operator that allows you to find websites that have particular keywords in their title tags. There are other variations for this query such as "allinurl" and "allinanchor"

Find blogs and sites that allow you to submit content

"search phrase" "guest blogger"

This is a relatively simple search query but a lot of people overlook it as it's so simple. Finding sites that have guest bloggers is a great way to offer your content out to other sites in an exchange for a link back.

Find websites that do specific reviews

[game reviews inurl:submit]

This is another example of a creative way to find links. By having in the inurl:submit within the search query it takes you to all the sites that have this keyword term (game reviews in this case) in their url and potentially directly to their submission pages.

Find sites that allow you to add html tags to your comments

"Allowed HTML tags" games

This query will give you all the sites that allow comments on their sites along with the added benefit of adding html tags to the comment itself. Now if you are going to add comments to sites in your industry it's always important that you add value and conversation to the article. Don't spam your industry's blogs as that's a sure-fire way to get yourself a bad name!

Happy Hunting!