Checking Backlinks

I didnt think this fit into the artcle section, so I am answering it here. It came up in a meeting, how to check backlinks and the difference between "link:" and "linkdomain:"  The answer is below. If you know of any other shortcuts, please feel free to add them.

In Yahoo

link:
searches for inbound links to exactly the page you tell it to.
www.yourhomepage.com and yourhomepage.com, without the www. will give you different results. Hopefully you have a 301 redirect from the non-www to the www anyway.

link:http://www.yourhomepage.com will give you the number of links going to that home page. It will not include links to internal pages.

linkdomain: 
will give you results for all pages/sites that link to any pages within your domain.  So it will include links to your homepage, links to your category and product pages as well.

linkdomain:yourhompage.com

Linkdomain will not work in google and google does not show all links anyway, so for checking backlinks, use Yahoo.

Others you may be intersted in...

In Google I use -

site:
checks which pages are indexed by that engine.  I use it without the "www." because it will then also show subdomian pages indexed.  I did this for a clients site once and found a complete duplicate site in a subdomain.

related:
will check other sites or pages that are similar to yours. Another good way to find duplicate websites.