Look how old this is! I post at SearchCommander.com now, and this post was published 17 years 10 days ago. This industry changes FAST, so blindly following the advice here *may not* be a good idea! If you're at all unsure, feel free to hit me up on Twitter and ask.
Live Search is finally showing backlink counts and locations again. In March of 2007, Microsoft announced that they were no longer able to support backlink checks through their search platform.
The reason (they said) was because they noticed too many automated queries, and they claimed that they would be “doing our best to get this back online as soon as possible…” but they never seemed to get around to it until now.
I’m not sure what they’ve done to eliminate automated queries, (and in fact to me it looks like they they didn’t do anything), but it appears to be fixed, although it operates just a little bit differently.
Tthe big difference? You now have to put a “+” sign in front of the link: or linkdomain: command and it’s now working again…
+linkdomain:domain.com or +link:domain.com
Nice! (or “big deal!” depending on the mood you’re in… 😉
Still, different tools give very different MBL results. +Link: query gives 1, Webmaster Center gives 4000 and Search Engine Genie gives 700. What is the right number, as such exists?
Jaak http://seoapplied.blogspot.com/