What I doing wrong when trying to search for links from external websites to my website

[whitbycottages]

This is just the little frustrating question nothing important but I’m sure somebody will know the answer. In the white board Friday this week Rand suggested at one point that when you’re searching for results links to your website if you put a - followed by site followed by your url like –site:yourwebsite.com you get the results of pages with links on other websites but excluding your own webpages but it just doesn’t work I get no results just an error message, any idea why? If I remove the - I get tons of results but there on my own webpages……….

[Adam.Whittles]

Hi Alan,

From the sounds of it, I believe you are missing the crucial element of adding the reference before the -site: operator.

For example I want to search for all references of [seomoz] minus results from the actual site (seomoz.org). Therefore, my search would look something like this:

seomoz -site:seomoz.org

Hope that helps.