The Ultimate Guide To Yahoo Search Operators

Search engines are incredibly advanced pieces of software. The basic interface that we see and the speed at which they work often makes us forget that. Since search engine databases hold such vast quantities of information that they put in place special features that allow you to refine what you search for. These “operators” are very useful when optimising your website for the search engines.

Yahoo is probably the most popular place to get accurate information on which websites link where. The information on Google is very unreliable, as is MSN/Live. Yahoo’s Site Explorer also gives us a goldmine of useful linking information.

This article will help you to use the advanced search operators in Yahoo Search to optimise and analyse the links to and from your website as well as those to and from your competitors websites.

Why Do I Need To Analyse My Competitors’ Links?

If you find a useful, relevant and popular website that links to one of your competitors, you need to ask yourself “why is this site not linking to me?“

It is also useful to find out which “power” sites are linking to you. Sites such .edu and .gov sites are widely regarded as more important to search engines and it’s easy to find where these sites link to. (Note: it is not the actual .edu and .gov extensions that make a site more authorative. Sites like these simply tend to among the more established and linked-to sites on the Web) Perhaps you want to find out which .info sites are linking to you with spammy keywords.

Important note. When Yahoo returns results in its regular listings and in Site Explorer it lists nofollowed links along with followed links and doesn’t differentiate between them. You will have to check the links manually or use a special tool to check if the links are followed or not.

What Operators Can I Use?

Let’s get started on the actual operators themselves.

Link:

Use link: to find documents that link to a particular URL. Link: requires you to use a full domain including http://.

Example: link:http://search.example.com/

This operator will find any page that links the specified page. The example above will match http://search.example.com only. It will not match links to http://www.example.com, http://search.example.com/blog or http://help.search.example.com.

When you use the link: operator you need to be careful when choosing to use www or not in the domain. If you look for links to http://example.com, a page that links to http://www.example.com will not be returned unless the webmaster has set up a redirect, which many of them do.

Linkdomain:

Use linkdomain: to find pages that link to any URL on that domain and on any subdomains.

Example: linkdomain:example.com

This will match pages that link to http://example.com, http://www.example.com, http://search.example.com and http://search.example.com/blog.

Important note. When you do a search using link: or linkdomain: you will be redirected to Yahoo Site Explorer. Although this is a great tool, often you don’t want to be redirected. To avoid this happening, simply add one of the other search operators or some search text to your query.

Site:

Use site: your search to a particular domain and all its subdomains. Whereas link: and linkdomain: were looking for links to a site, the site: operator is conducting a search within a particular domain. For this reason, you need to use additional operators to your query or add some search text. If you just use site:example.com by itself you will be redirected to Yahoo Site Explorer.

Example: site:example.com horse.

This will search the domain example.com for the phrase “horse.” It will also match results on search.example.com and help.search.example.com.

Example: site: search.example.com horse.

This will match results on search.example.com and help.search.example.com but NOT example.com.

Hostname:

Use hostname: to find all documents from a particular host. It won’t search the subdomains of this host.

Example: hostname:example.com horse.

This will find results for the query “horse” from example.com. It won’t search blog.example.com.

Example: hostname: search.example.com horse.

This will only find results from that particular subdomain. It won’t find results from example.com or help.search.example.com.

Url:

Use url: to find a specific document in Yahoo’s search index. This operator does not search a domain, it simply locates the page and provides a link to it. It is useful to determine if a specific page is indexed.

Example: url:http://www.example.com.

The full URL is required. In the above example url:www.example.com would not match any results. With this operator you need to be careful about whether you include www or not. This is one of the reasons why webmasters are encouraged to make a site with or without www resolve to the same page.

Inurl:

Use inurl: to search the actual URLs in the search index for the search terms.

Example: inurl:horse.

The example above will return any page with the term “horse” in the URL. The search term will be highlighted in the results. You can use inurl: in isolation without any other operators or search terms.

Intitle:

This operator will search the page titles for the search terms.

Example: intitle:horse.

The example above will return any page with the term “horse” in the