In March, 2007 Live/MSN/Microsoft infuriated countless numbers of webmasters and SEOs by pulling down the link:, linkdomain:, and inurl: advanced search operators. By typing link:trinitysem.com the search engine would provide a list of all the sites linking to the site queried.

Webmasters and SEOs found this helpful for the link building process, to assess competition, and myriad other uses. Unfortunately for the legitimate users of these operators the Live Search official blog announced that the operators would be shut off as a result of abuse by automated processes for the purposes of data mining. Here is the post: http://blogs.msdn.com/livesearch/archive/2007/03/28/we-are-flattered-but.aspx

Today while completing a research project for an SEO client I discovered that the link: operator did function for the following queries:

link:http://www.mysolitaire.com/

link:http://www.google.com

link:http://www.amazon.com

link:http://www.apache.com

Here is an example:

Unfortunately the system still does not yield results for minor sites:

link:http://www.racesuit.com

While it doesn’t appear to be fully functioning it is great to see the Live / MSN link: operator now functioning. I had given up on it.

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