How to Find Backlinks with the * Operator in Google
This post was originally written on October 2, 2013.
I’ve read books on SEO, and many of them recommended using link: on Google to find competitor backlinks like this:
link:yourcompetitorwebsite.com
Things have changed since I first wrote this blog post in 2013. When I first used the link operator on mrtechnique.com, there were only 3 results in Google:
The year is now 2018, and there are a lot more search results than that although the results consist of more than external links to our website. In the following screenshot, you’ll see that the first 4 results are from mrtechnique.com.
About 16,300 results were produced from this search query. Results 5-10 are legitimate backlinks from social media and local directory websites. However, when I went to page 2 of this search query, I found some results unrelated to mrtechnique.com:
The results regarding “MR technique” have nothing to do with mrtechnique.com. So, using the link operator in Google will allow you to find some competitor backlinks, there’s a better search query than this. I knew that if refined my search query by using site:websiteaddress.com on Google, I would get all of a website’s pages that are allowed to be indexed by Google.
Then it hit me! I remembered all the way back to my teenage years when I used DOS. I remembered using the wildcard (*) operator when I wanted to find all the files in a directory. If using site: showed all of a website’s pages indexed by Google and the * operator showed everything, I figured if I could use the following query to find all of a competitor’s backlinks that were indexed on Google:
site:* competitorwebsite.com
When I used this query on our competitors, I was able to find a lot of websites where I could get some relevant backlinks (e.g. directories, blogs, review websites. See below for the results this search query produced for mrtechnique.com:
This query refined the results even more (around 14,000). When I first wrote this blog post, this was as far as I got, but I learned that I could refine this search query even more. I learned that if you want to exclude all pages from a certain website, you can use -site:websiteaddress.com to do this. So, by combining this exclusion part to the search query to the query above, I came up with this query to find competitor backlinks:
site:* competitorwebsite.com -site:competitorwebsite.com
See the below screenshot to see the results that this backlink search query produced for mrtechnique.com:
Most of the results in this screenshot are places where you can get a backlink, but not all of the search results in the screenshot above are websites with backlinks to mrtechnique.com. The search query only produces mentions of mrtechnique.com. There also wasn’t 13,200 results. I was only able to view about 330 results. Like a regular Google search query, the first pages produce the best results.
Simon from twelve2 suggested (in the comments below) this query that also returns legitimate results:
“competitorwebsite.com” -inurl:competitorwebsite.com
See the below screenshot to see the results that this backlink search query produced for mrtechnique.com:
Although Google says there are 437 results, I only was able to view about 360 results. Like a regular Google search query, the first pages produce the best results.
Give these search queries a shot. Remember to use your competitor’s website URL in place of mine. I hope this helps. If you’ve tried this out for yourself, let me know how it went for you by posting a comment below. If you have a better way of generating competitor backlinks, feel free to let me know in the comments as well. Thanks for reading.
its really great operator. thanks for sharing
Well thanks a lot for the tip
Every good thing comes to an end.
This trick no more works. I guess Google has fixed this issue. After all, a big slice of their SERP algorithm is based on back-link profile.
But, nice try anyways.
Keep up the good work. There are only few people out there who use their brains. Rest are only busy picking other people’s mind.
Cheers,
Salan, it still works.
Just updated this post with some valuable information.
Yes Its working. Thanks Alot. TOM, you shared an awesome technique.
Chris, thank for letting me know. I’m happy to hear that the technique worked for you 🙂
Nice. You’re probably better off forcing the search and then removing anything on your own domain though:
“mrtechnique.com” -inurl:mrtechnique.com
Returns about 540 results all which appear to be relevant.
Thanks for the tip, Simon. Using your query did cut down on the results, and I do like the results better. I’ll update this post pretty soon with your tip.
Simon, I just reviewed both queries, and although they differ a little. The amounts of results are almost the same despite the numbers that Google gives.
Sir, I used to check my competitor backlinks through your competitor analysis tutorial, but one problem that is how to check specific keyword backlink via “example.com” -inurl: example.com would you please help me
Meer,
Are you not getting possible places to get backlinks when you run that query?
I need to know how to make a snippet
Thank You For Sharing it… Pretty Interesting..
It has been helpful and amazing techniques to enhance my links Sir
Thanks for Sharing Stay Blessed
Hi,
Nice to see this info. It is really simple but did not think it before. Checked last technique (site.com -inurl:site.com) and found good backlink opportunities. I’ll start to dig 🙂
Thank you very much.
Thanks for letting me know that this helped you 🙂
I use a tool called Scrapebox and with this modifier or footprint it will help me find exactly I am looking for. Because before I had no clue and was finding thousands of links similar to your first example but this will help me cut it down.
I use personnal app for see and analyse backlinks. Your post it’s great 😉
This article provides a tip on using the * operator in Google to find backlinks. The author suggests combining the site: operator with the * operator to search for all indexed pages of a competitor’s website and uncover potential backlinks. They share their own experience and encourage readers to try this method and provide feedback. The article concludes by inviting readers to share alternative approaches for generating competitor backlinks. Overall, it offers a practical technique for finding backlinks and encourages engagement from readers to share their own insights.