I know of several sites that can be used to track who is linking to your web site. Here’s a list of the ones I typically use.

Bloglines
Daypop
Blogrolling
Truth laid bear ecosystem
Blogdex
Bloogz
Technorati

Missing from this list is a site who used backlinks to determine a site’s popularity and became extremely popular because of it. The site I’m referring to is Google and the reason it isn’t in the list is because the results are inundated with links to my own site, which don’t interest me in the least. To try it out, search for link:www.example.com. It doesn’t make sense that Google doesn’t provide a way to view external links exclusively. We all have links to our own sites; it’s called navigation.

So my question is: How can you use Google to find external links to your site (excluding links from your own site)?

I found a half-baked solution on webmasterworld.com suggesting you search for “+www.example.+com” -site:www.example.com but it will only find the literal text of the URL on other pages (in other words, http://dan.hersam.com). It wouldn’t find links to your site that use hyperlinked text (like Dan Hersam) so it’s extremely limited in its utility.

During my research I discovered that you can search for your domain on Yahoo using the ‘linkdomain:’ option. It will find any link to your domain, which is great if you have your own domain and no subdomains. If you’re using a shared domain like blogspot.com or geocities.com, or if you have subdomains, it won’t be of much use.

If anyone out there knows of a way to use Google to search for links to your site while excluding links from your own site, please let me know.