Bing recently came out of beta in the UK and we are seeing the beginnings of the advertising campaign to promote it.
For SEOs, however, there is a more immediate opportunity with Bing than hoping it gathers some market share from Google(*). Linkfromdomain is a search operator that is unique to Bing. It returns the pages that are linked-to from a domain. There are obviously other ways of getting this information in raw form (maybe including Linkscape one day, but certainly including Xenu for mid-sized sites), but for large sites especially, it can be really hard to gather it in any kind of usable form.
The usage of linkfromdomain is to search on Bing for something like:
- linkfromdomain:ox.ac.uk (returns pages linked from the Oxford University site – more on this below)
- linkfromdomain:ox.ac.uk intitle:broadband (filters to broadband in the title)
- linkfromdomain:ox.ac.uk wimax (searches for wimax anywhere on the linked-to page)
The set of results is generally returned in a similar ordering to a regular search query – with a combination of highly relevant and more powerful results first. Unfortunately linkfromdomain does not support searches for sub-domains (even www.) you have do search for linkfromdomain:exampledomain.com.
How do you use this for SEO?
This is a linkbuilding tip post – the idea being two-fold:
- suppose you have a powerful target website (such as an educational institution) and you are seeking ways of getting links from them, this gives you tools for finding techniques, content types and targets for those links (more on this below but it’s very effective for building highly trusted links)
- sometimes the “one-step-removed” linkbuilding model can work superbly well for identifying linkbuilding targets. If I were running a cooking blog (wait, I do – it took superhuman effort not to drop a shameless link there), it might be a good idea to look at something like this as a superb linkbuilding target list
The information contained in the second approach is typically findable through other means (or the targets are likely to appear on your radar in other ways) and there is a lot of searching through chaff to find wheat. I wanted to run through a worked example today to show you how powerful method #1 can be:
Worked example
I had to pick a niche and a target for my worked example. I decided to imagine I was linkbuilding for a technical but not-specifically-web-related company. I’m trying to get links from trusted authoritative domains so I start with big educational institutions.
As some of you may know, I studied at the University of Cambridge (ending with a year at the Statslab). I don’t want them getting link requests from all you lot, so I picked Oxford (**).
I’m pretending my imaginary client works in some area of telecoms and has resources and technical papers on subjects like wimax and spectrum usage.
First up, wimax:
It turns out that conted.ox.ac.uk is a goldmine for linkbuilders. It’s the Continuing Education section of the Oxford University site and seems to be very generous with linking out. I might suggest that my client gives a talk or writes a resource for a CPD course. At the very least, it might be worth creating some content to target this kind of page.
Tip: I find it best to look for links to pages that aren’t homepages because it’s typically easier to find where the link originates from. Bing doesn’t have an effective link: operator meaning that we have to use Yahoo, Linkscape or similar. Because we are then not using the same index, it can be tricky to track down the link found by linkfromdomain.
Another example starting with spectrum auctions – sometimes it’s funny where this kind of research can take you:
(Incidentally, I found a very similar opportunity on the Cambridge site, but no, I’m not going to tell you about it.)
In an unexpected turn of events, I also found some pretty active blogs writing about my target subject matter on ox.ac.uk URLs. Even I’m not mean enough to fill up those guys’ inboxes with outreach from you lot just because they picked the wrong university.
(*) I don’t know about anyone else, but I am rooting for a more balanced search market (particularly in the UK, where Google has a ~90% market share). I think competition is good for consumers and for businesses.
(**) seriously, we don’t get on (US folks, think of the relationship between Duke and UNC) but I’m not encouraging anyone to spam Oxford University. Really. I’m not. Even though the varsity match is this week.
There are some other great resources on linkfromdomain – I really liked PPC blog’s tip about expired and for sale domains.
Rand has also written about the uses of linkfromdomain for finding spam you are linking to as well as teasing you with the fact that he “gave up” a similar tip to my worked example above at SMX Advanced.
