Search Engine Watch Forums

xbob · #1 09-06-2005

Try this command in Google. It seems to be showing the full set of backlinks for my site instead of the 10-12% sampling that link: shows.

link|www.mysite.com (that's a pipe)

Can anyone else verify the validity of this command?

onedodd · #2 09-07-2005

That can't be right - I don't know what in the heck that shows for my site. It is showing over 20,000 links and I can tell you right now thats not possible.

I used that pipe - Alls I can say is wow, it must be counting everytime my site name appears somewhere whether its a link or not.

Actually now that I check it is counting ADWORDS links. I didn't think it could count those but I checked some of the cached pages and sure enough.

Ozwold · #3 09-07-2005

Quote:

Originally Posted by xbob

Try this command in Google. It seems to be showing the full set of backlinks for my site instead of the 10-12% sampling that link: shows.

link|www.mysite.com (that's a pipe)

Can anyone else verify the validity of this command?

I've got to admit, I've never come across using that command BEFORE. I did check this out, and its says I have around 2,500 which is great. It some cases I have a link, and in some cases I can't seem to find one though.

martinuboo · #4 09-07-2005

I just tried link|mydomain.com (mydomain = my real domain name) and received a high number, but when I look at the sites listed, I don't see any links to my site. When I look at the cache of the first few, I see this "These terms only appear in links pointing to this page: link|mydomain com" (note the dot before com is gone).

I have no idea what this is showing, but I don't think it has anything to do with my site.

I do see that a backlink update is happening. My backlink total went down, while it continues to grow on Y! and MSN.

martin

mtb167 · #5 09-07-2005

So. I have a relatively new site. The individual pages have been thoroughly indexed in google but not the backlinks. Since the last backlink index I have started accumulating reciprocal links to the site from other sites with relevant content. Between Yahoo and MSN all of these links have been picked up, and until yesterday none of them had been in Google.

Before yesterday when i did a "link:http://www.fabric.com/quilting-fabric.aspx" it returned nothing. But now when I do it, it returns 97 links from within my domain but none from the new reciprocal inbound links.

What is interesting and pertinent to this discussion is that when i do a "link|http://www.fabric.com/quilting-fabric.aspx" none of the in-domain backlinks are shown, but the inbound reciprocal links are.

However! My site has not moved in the rankings since the addition of these links. So they don't appear to be helping. It's as if google knows they're there, but won't give my site credit for them.

Ideas?

jan · #6 09-07-2005

Don't see much difference with a search for "www.site.com".

xbob · #7 09-07-2005

Quote:

Originally Posted by jan

Don't see much difference with a search for "www.site.com".

Yeah I see your point Jan. Probably just a normal text search.

dannysullivan · #8 09-08-2005

The link: command is the documented command to use. If you use something other than that, who knows what you'll get.

My initial thought was that you'd get pages that might text match. IE, the pipe might be seen as a space, so a search for:

link|searchenginewatch.com

would be the same as

link searchenginewatch.com

That doesn't seem to be the case, however. If I do those searches, I get different results.

What intrigued me was this from the pipe search, the link|searchenginewatch.com one. Look at these snippets:

Quote:

Search Engine Watch: Tips About Internet Search Engines & Search ...
Searchenginewatch.com The source for search engine marketing ...
www.searchenginewatch.com Danny Sullivan, Editor; Chris Sherman, Associate Editor ...

Quote:

Index of /
... [DIR] scott/ 22-Jun-2005 12:57 - [DIR] src/ 02-May-2005 15:30 - [VID]
wsb.avi 12-May-2005 18:41 216M. Apache/1.3.33 Server at www.theatre-link.com Port 80.

In the first, you can see it matching searchenginewatch.com, making sense, in that this is part of the search if it's a search for words on the page. But link.com? The only way you get that as a match is if the pipe is being treated as a wildcard, so that it's a search for anything l*m, ie between the first letter and the last.

Problem is, Google does have a wildcard command, *, as in link*searchenginewatch.com. And that brings up entirely different results.

Meanwhile, check out the cached copy of the page in that second snippet:
http://66.102.9.104/search?q=cache:K...en&lr=&strip=1

See this:

Quote:

These search terms have been highlighted: link|searchenginewatch com

That's just not true, just as martinuboo saw. Look at the page and you can see this.

So what exactly that pipe symbol does, it's a mystery to me. I'm going to split this part out into a new thread in case others want to explore.

berneboy · #9 09-08-2005

For me it look obvious.

Since pipe is considered as an 'or' command in a whole bunch of programming and query languages, how about google treating it as such.

I tried an individual search for "palliof" returning 1 result and an individual search for "polliof" returning 4 results.

And searching for "palliof|polliof" returned 5 results...

And an advanced search "palliof OR polliof" gives the exact same result.

martinuboo · #10 09-08-2005

I remember back in the infoseek days that the | (pipe) would act a secondary search (after the pipe) within the first word search. Same as the "search within these results" radio button we used to see.

Google is not doing that. If I search for link:|mydomain.com, the SERPs return listings with "link" in them, but not "mydomain.com". It doesn't matter if you use the colon or not. Very strange!

dannysullivan · #11 09-08-2005

The OR command on Google is done exactly like that, OR capitalized. I've never seen the pipe suggested as an alternative. It could be undocumented. The problem is, if you look back at the snippet, a search for link|searchenginewatch.com was bringing back a match for link.com and seemingly as if that was a single word. For that to happen, I would have had to have searched for link.com as one of my OR possibilities.

OK, so maybe link|searchenginewatch.com = link OR searchengine.com = link OR searchenginewatch OR com. But neither of those same two possibilities comes up with the same results as link|searchenginewatch.com. So I'm not thinking it's an OR thing.

GoogleGuy · #12 09-08-2005

I believe the '|' character is an undocumented way to do an OR. Programmers will recognize '|' as the way to do an OR in C and C++. So [agassi|davenport] is equivalent to the search [agassi OR davenport].

You can also combine it with phrase quotes, so [cheap "top referers"|"some viewing statistics"] searches for documents with the word cheap that have either "top referers" OR "some viewing statistics" on the page as well.

I prefer to use | instead of OR because it makes me feel smarter, and because it saves me like three characters of typing (if you include the spaces you have to put around the OR). So I'll have to do about 235 | searches to make up for the keystrokes I've used to type this.

jan · #13 09-08-2005

But (imho) "|" and "OR" give different results - and different numbers. Also when using "link|", the word "link" is not highlighted in the results. With "OR" it is.

dannysullivan · #14 09-08-2005

Ditto what Jan said. If pipe is supposed to be like OR, it certainly isn't working that way if you actually use OR in place of it.

DaveN · #15 09-09-2005

yer GG is right on this one, apart from he didn't say anything about how they handle a url search. I will use my website has the example because it's not too big

If you search using :

link:www.davidnaylor.co.uk = 71

"www.davidnaylor.co.uk" = 563
( this is the contains query anything that has "www.davidnaylor.co.uk" linked or unlinked)

ok lets test

link|www.davidnaylor.co.uk =563
site|www.davidnaylor.co.uk =563
beer|www.davidnaylor.co.uk =563
broken|www.davidnaylor.co.uk =563

its the www.davidnaylor.co.uk that messes the data, it's just the way googles search handler works..

DaveN

dannysullivan · #16 09-09-2005

OK, I'll play

link:searchenginewatch.com = 14,700
link|searchenginewatch.com = 2,230,000
beer|searchenginewatch.com = 701,000
broken|searchenginewatch.com = 525,000
"searchenginewatch.com" = 518,000

Hmm. Maybe it's the www? We don't use them, we redirect to the domain without, but Google still sometimes sees them separately. So I tried:

link:www.searchenginewatch.com = 14,700 (nice!, seems to have www = non)
link|www.searchenginewatch.com = 164,000
beer|www.searchenginewatch.com = 163,000
broken|www.searchenginewatch.com = 163,000
"www.searchenginewatch.com" = 163,000

So I'm with you on the www. It seems that if you use a domain name with www and a pipe directly in front of it, the preceding word is ignored and you get the results of pages containing the entire term. IE:

beer|www.searchenginewatch.com DOES NOT EQUAL
beer OR www searchenginewatch com BUT INSTEAD
"www.searchenginewatch.com"

And that's just not consistant with the pipe being an undocumented OR. OK, not a big deal to anyone but .000000000000001% of the searchers out there.

And remove the www? I'm still finding no reason to explain my previous set of numbers.

Most important, nothing -- nothing I've seen -- explains why a search for [link|searchenginewatch.com] brings back a page with a snippet with link.com highlighted. How that query ending up being a match for [link.com] is the most intriguing part to me.

dannysullivan · #17 09-09-2005

Ah, the solution, maybe. Spotted via Barry's site, http://www.seroundtable.com/archives/002499.html, Hendry Lee says here, http://www.marketingloop.com/index/s...e_an_analysis/

Quote:

So, to make it easier to understand link.com|searchenginewatch.com equals to link.(com|searchenginewatch).com, which perfectly matches link:searchenginewatch.com or link:com.com or even linkxcomvcom, if that string exists in any page.

Take a look. At first I thought this must be the answer, but then it still didn't wash. I mean, if pipe=OR and .=wildcard, then

link|searchenginewatch.com = link OR searchenginewatch*.com

Except wildcard can mean any number of characters while . may be any single character (I think Inktomi used to have commands like that, several versus one).

But in reality, that search is working something like this:
link.com OR searchenginewatch.com

Something like, because the counts are still diferent:

link.com OR searchenginewatch.com = 1,910,00
link|searchenginewatch.com = 2,230,000

So while I can kind of get closer to how Google comes up with the link.com match by doing other types of queries, I'm afraid I'm still not seeing how link|searchenginewatch.com itself made that happen.

DaveN · #18 09-09-2005

have you played with link~www.searchenginewatch.com ... bwhahahha..

DaveN

dannysullivan · #19 09-09-2005

Now you're just playing with my mind, Dave!

That just looks like [link www.searchenginewatch.com] to me.

Hey, how about [link~*www.searchenginewatch.com 1...100000]. Why? Why not

DaveN · #20 09-09-2005

link~*.searchenginewatch.com hehe

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