A dated but still effective search engine optimization “trick” is every 2-3 months go back and look for new links pointing to your site within the search engines. What you then do is you take all of these individual urls that link to you… whether it is an authority site or a small content site and you submit those new links right back to the search engine’s submission form of that network.

For example, once you found the sites that link to you in Google, go back and add them to Google. Add a site to Google: http://www.google.com/addurl/. Add a site to Yahoo!: https://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/submit. Add a site to MSN: http://search.live.com/docs/submit.aspx (By submitting a url to here It should get that url indexed within 24 hours in MSN). Once that is done and the search engines updates their new links within their system, the webmaster could start seeing new fresh links without doing any extra work other then submitting the site that links to them. However, that’s the web 1.0 version to this technique but it still gets the job done. Next, I will explain the web 2.0 technique of this.

The good news is that the first part of this technique still kicks off the same. You want to find as many urls as possible that links to your site. With the simple query that I give you below this should be enough to find a healthy number of links that points toward your sites.

However, hate to bust your bubble you will never be able to find all of the links that points toward your sites and you shouldn’t worry either because finding all of them will be very time extensive process. So in essence, what we are doing is finding all of the sites that link to us and then generating extra web presence to those specific urls. If the site that links to you generates more traffic then your site should as well. The more web presence that the site that links to you gets equals the more presence that your site could get in return. It is what I call a perfect strategic link alliance. To find the sites that link to you in the specific search engines enter these search queries in them:

[** Note, replace “yourwebsiteurl” with the url to your site].
Type these queries in the Google search function:

www.yourwebsiteurl.com
Link: www.yourwebsiteurl.com (This will generate a lot less links but a lot of search engine professionals believe that these are the links that Google show the most prominence or importance to.) Type this query into the Yahoo! search function: link:www.yourwebsiteurl.com

In addition, another query you can type in is:linkdomain: www.yourwebsiteurl.com. Once that is done scroll across the dialog box and choose “except from this domain” from the “show lnlinks” option, and then choose “entire site” next to the “to” option as indicated in the image below.

This should give you the sites that have links to your site excluding your own url. Type this query to find the sites that link to you in MSN: "yourwebsiteurl.com" -site:yourwebsiteurl.com

**Make sure to include both quotation marks where the text yourwebsiteurl.com is displayed. Go to each search engine and scan through the queries and find unique urls that links to your site and add them in an excel sheet. From my experience there is no absolute way to find out all of the links that are pointing to your site at any given moment. So, what I do is use search queries that are unique for each search engine to find sites that link to me within their system. Once you collect sites that link to you from one search engine you can then go and look for fresh links in the new search engines. My philosophy is search engines main functions are the same and most of them will operate very similar as well given a couple of different variables.

From my experiences the main search engines will share a lot of common urls that link back to you. However, many of them will have sites that link to you that the other search engines do not contain. So, by running search queries in each unique search engine you are virtually guaranteed to pick up missing links to your site then if you were just using your favorite search engine to do all of the data mining.

** On a side note, when you are looking for sites that link to you in the top search engines, you will see that some search engines have more sites listed that links to your site compared to the others. Depending on some variables the sites that have more of your links placed within their system will probably bring you the higher number of referrals in your website’s analytics.

** Once you collect enough urls that link to your site ( I would say anywhere from 10-50 fresh new links for a small to medium trafficked site), take these urls and submit them to Google Base as a “reference article” to ensure that the search engine spiders will crawl around and pay them a nice little visit.

In addition, what I would recommend is instead of submitting all of the sites that link to you to “Google Base,” I would recommend diversifying the networks that you submit content at. I would recommend submitting about half of the sites that link to you back to “Google base,” and then the other half to popular social media news sharing sites like Digg and Propeller which I will explain in more detail within the next chapter. 64 Digg will ban a site if it keeps submitting content from the SAME url. However, it is harder for Digg to catch on if you are submitting different urls that link back to a common url, especially if the site that is linking to you is using anchor text. If a site that links to you gets more traffic, then your site will leech some of that traffic off it as well. So, at the end of every couple of months I would recommend filtering through the search engines and finding the sites that links to yours and using this method.

You may be surprise on how much extra traffic you can find your site getting by simply marketing sites that links to you.

if you like this article, please do book-mark me