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MSN (Live Search) Link Command Fix
On 20 March '07 the MSN Live Search link: and linkdomain: command keywords broke and has been broken ever since. Of course - this is causing issues for rank tracking companies like MarketLeap and Direct-Link-Ads.The command is supposed to show a website's backlinks and the syntax is link:www.sitename.com. When you type this into any of the major Search Engines it shows you the pages that link to the site (That is all the engines except MSN Live Search).
We have been given a workaround to help users find their MSN Backlinks. The trick is to replace the characters with their ASCII codes.
The new syntax to check your backlinks is:
http://search.msn.co.uk/results.aspx?q=%6c%69%6e%6b%64%6f%6d%61%69%6e%3alive.com
Link:
http://search.msn.co.uk/results.aspx?q=%6c%69%6e%6b%64%6f%6d%61%69%6e%3alive.com
Note that only the LinkDomain: keyword works and the Link: command is still broken. LinkDomain: shows all the back-links for the site while Link: only shows the back links to the specific page.
Thanks to Direct Link Ads for the fix!
Update - 15 May 2007
The linkdomain fix above has been disabled by MSN Live Search. Which means the Link: and LinkDomain: commands are both unavailable.
This confirms that it wasn't a glitch but that Microsoft has decided to remove the commands manually.
We will update this page if another workaround can be found.
Microsoft News posted on 17 April 2007
