How To Research Links From Domain

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Ann Smarty

12/29/08

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While I have previously touched upon a few tools allowing to explore any page outbound links (explore and validate page outbound links, visualize page outlinking tactics, etc), I never looked at ways to find all websites a given domain links out to.

First of all, let’s see why you might need this information:

• Investigating domain outbound links should be part of your competition research:
  • learn who your competitor’s "friends" are;
  • learn who your competitor trusts;
  • find your competitor’s partners;
  • identify your competitor’s network of sites;
  • investigate your competitor’s out-linking tactics, etc.
• Domain outbound link research can help to craft your advertising campaign. Here is how Gab of SEO ROI describes this so called "link graph" tactic:
  

  1. Find sites you’d consider advertising on.
  2. Look at who they link to most.
  3. Advertise on the sites that share the most common links.

• A website out-linking tactics may help in your link building:
  • estimate the likelihood of the website linking to you by investigating what type of sites it promotes;
  • get more information for your blog pitching message (e.g. "I noticed that you are referring to … So I thought you might be also interested to hear about our service…")

So how to actually find external outbound links of a domain?

1. Use Live / MSN advanced operator LinkFromDomain: advanced operator.

This is my favorite method as it allows for much flexibility. For example, you can use {-site:} operator to exclude any domain or restrict the results to any country / region, etc.

2. Use Xenu Link Sleuth: that’s actually the 8th thing you can do with this awesome tool.

Just submit the home page URL, wait for the tool to process all the domain links and sort by the URL:

3. Use Walk to Web tool (which can be done more for fun than for anything else): the utility graphically represents any domain external outbound links and also gives a screen shot of each destination site: