Evaluating a web site or blog is never easy. Fact checking will weed out the crap, but who needs to start with a lot of crap. The number of links to a site will supposedly put it towards the top of the search results, but that isn’t a guarantee of accuracy if the inbound links are from sites full of crap.
When I see something worth citing, I begin the evaluation by seeing who links to the site, perhaps it will be other sites already proven reliable through fact checking. This may also lead you to more or better data.
To explore the inbound links forget Google. Yahoo’s Site Explorer is much better, but its commands are limited. If you look at the inbound links to this site you will be swamped by internal links and they are very difficult to remove from the search results.
Altavista offers the best solution. It’s a secret only revealed to Information Professionals who know the secret handshake. If you don’t know the secret handshake, then you’re in luck today. For only four small payments of $29.95 this life enhancing secret is yours. (Shipping and handling extra — much extra.)
The commands to use are link:, linkdomain:, and the undocumented and highly secret -site: command. Now, remember who owns Altavista. That’s right, our friends over at Yahoo!. Altavista uses the Yahoo! database!
Use link: with a full URL to our article on Competitive Intelligence, French Style. Then add -site: with this site’s domain to eliminate the internal links to this article.
You can do much the same thing with the command linkdomain: to find inbound links to the domain (this tends to work better than link: in my experience) and use -site: to eliminate internal links. Doing this finds 3500 inbound links to this blog.
Very nice article. I wish Google would be more accurate with showing all the links to a site. Some sites, even when well indexed will not have all the pages displayed in their search engine when using “link:” command.