You may have noticed that MSN Live Search has removed the query syntax link: as well as linkdomain: and inurl: from it's search results so you can no longer check your backlinks in MSN.

Reason: http://blogs.msdn.com/livesearch/arc...tered-but.aspx

However, there is an easy fix. Use HotBot (powered by MSN Live Search) and you can still view the backlinks. For some reason link: through HotBot searching MSN still works.
Take a look:
http://www.searchbliss.com/seo-tools/popularity.asp

Will this last? I hope so, otherwise I will have to drop MSN from my link popularity tool.

Ok lets respect MSN for this...

This kind of thing always looks bad.
Instead of thinking "MSN are tackling data mining well" I'm thinking "MSN have to reduce the functionality of their search engine because they don't know what to do to prevent data mining".

It would have been far better if they left the functionality and let the scrapers use it while they look for a preventative measure than to panic and remove it.

I agree stOx, they did panic. They will find a fix, and within months there will be the same problem, so why do they bother. The data mining probably provides MSN with more traffic anyhow.

I would say they are right to remove it and would be pretty sure that Yahoo are very likely to follow suit.

The data mining probably provides MSN with more traffic anyhow.

As with everything, traffic without reason is simply a drain on resources.

The only people using the advanced search tools such as link: site: etc are webmasters and SEOs, and these types of users are NOT what SEs care about.

At the end of the day what does knowing how many backlinks a page has tell you ???

Ouch Chris.

Originally Posted by chrishirst

I would say they are right to remove it and would be pretty sure that Yahoo are very likely to follow suit.

I agree.

As with everything, traffic without reason is simply a drain on resources.

Again, I agree.

The only people using the advanced search tools such as link: site: etc are webmasters and SEOs, and these types of users are NOT what SEs care about.

True, yet not true. Yes only SEOs and Webmasters use them...but for some reason SE's have added these syntaxes. Why, because without webmasters creating sites, there would be NO search engines. Who pays them for advertising as well? Webmasters for the most part. You don't even need a good site to pay for google, MSN, and Yahoo ad...to name a few SE's.

At the end of the day what does knowing how many backlinks a page has tell you ???

Well for me, it tells me wether or not I am on the right track. It gives me just a little insight into who is linking to my site and why. If 85% are linking to a perticular piece of content, then I know there is a demand for that content. This helps me improve, and there is nothing wrong with that.

Why, because without webmasters creating sites, there would be NO search engines. Who pays them for advertising as well? Webmasters for the most part. You don't even need a good site to pay for google, MSN, and Yahoo ad...to name a few SE's

True, BUT the advertisers need the real users to click on their adverts, and it's the real users that SEs are concerned with. The webmaster user base is a small percentage of the total users. And if the SEs don't keep the real users coming back, product sales from the advertising will drop off and the advertisers will reduce their spend on that advertising channel.

Well for me, it tells me wether or not I am on the right track. It gives me just a little insight into who is linking to my site and why. If 85% are linking to a perticular piece of content, then I know there is a demand for that content. This helps me improve, and there is nothing wrong with that

Agreed, But who links to your content is less valuable than who sends visitors. For every 10 backlinks there maybe just one sending visitors, this is the one you need to know about the other 9 are just fluff.
BY finding the site that sends visitors, you could concentrate your link building around that style or genre of site. So rather than waste effort getting links from the sites you think are useful, you can look for ones that you know are useful.

Touché Chris.

try hotbot.com instread

Is data mining and scraping that big a problem? Knowing your rank on a million potential queries isn't that helpful ( although I guess most people think they are ). The search engines are meant to scale forever, and I wonder just how much burden auto-checkers are actually putting on the systems?

Well, I think they put these functionalities to allow advertisers to analyse their site stats as a way to effective targeting of advertising. But, I agree that search engines don't want SEOs playing with their system. But, as Forrest said, aren't search engines meant to scale forever ?

The automatic checkers and scrapers put a huge unwanted load on anything they are run against. Mainly because the inconsiderate ba$!4rd$ who code these things have no thought for the sites they are scraping.

They simply allow their product to grab pages from a server at whatever speed the client machine can cycle at, and with the spread of broadband and very quick machines, this could be maybe 1 or 2 seconds between requests.
Multiply that over thousands of "users" and the server drain could be crucial at peak times.

Now of course everyone who was running link queries at Google are now running even more at MSN and Yahoo, so from MSNs POV why should they have to bear a massive query load for something that the people running these queries are doing so while considering the effect of the results for a different search engine !!!!!

What would you do about it ???

On my directory, I have a real search, with an algo and a relevance score next to the site listed in the SERPs. This one guy decided to add my directory to his "rank checking" software. Within a month's time, there were more than 10,000 requests per week from his crap.

On one month (during the summer) it sucked up over 8 GIG of bandwidth in less than 12 hrs.

We sent notices through legal, and followed every avenue we could and the guy refused to remove the directory from his software. I posted a thread about it at the time over at IHY.

Well, I wrote a script that stopped it.
He kept "fixing" his software, and within hours, it was broken again (because of my script). It was pathetic, he'd list us as "fixed" ... and went back and forth with it for about a week ... and then we were listed as "deleted"

If I can do this, MSN programmers can too.

I think I would take the same approach, although if it's 10,000 IPs I might just remove the functionality all together. That's really a shame to have to do, but 8 GB in 12 hours ... I had no idea scraping could be that devastating.

Deb - do you happen to have the user agent string your friend reported? I know that's easy to manipulate, but I'm curious how many people actually do?

It was RankingManager. Here's a link to the original thread at IHY :
http://www.ihelpyou.com/forums/showt...threadid=16067

Hey Chris, don't you think they'd be able to use mod throttle over at MSN to put a stop to this kind of activity?

In case anyone is interested to learn more: