For those of you in the industry, you have probably already heard that MSN are no longer allowing the use of advanced query searches “link:”, “linkdomain:” and “inurl:”. But we have recently been asked quite a lot about this, hence the post!
What this prevents us from doing for our clients is accurately reporting on how many links back to their website, MSN has on it’s search engine.
MSN LiveSearch team say they have blocked this because of automated usage for data mining purposes. They have stated on their blog, that they expect a new service to be live pretty soon.
For the official blog article visit http://blogs.msdn.com/livesearch/archive/2007/03/28/we-are-flattered-but.aspx
The link: results from MSN, like the other engines were far from accurate anyway. Your best bet now would be to combine the list from Google webmaster central with the list from Yahoo Site Explorer.
agreed.