2.4.2. Finding Sites to Make a Link Request

To find sites that are appropriate for an inbound link request, you should:

• Consider the sites you find useful, entertaining, and informative

• Use the web taxonomic directories to find sites in your category and in related categories (See "Working with Directories," earlier in this chapter)

• Use specialized searching syntax to find the universe of sites that search engines such as Google regard as "related" to yours

If you've looked carefully at Google search results, you may have noticed a Similar pages link (Figure 2-8).

Figure 2-8. You can use the Google Similar Pages link to find sites that might be interested in linking to yours (because they are like yours)

The Similar Pages link is supposed to show you more pages like the one the link modifies. How well it works varies widely (it works better on popular, highly ranked pages and less well on obscure pages). But it can give you some leads.

You can bypass the process of clicking Similar Pages by using the Google related: operator followed by a web page directly in a Google search. For example, entering the following Google search:

    related:www.bearhome.com

is comparable to clicking the Similar Pages link for www.bearhome.com (and shows exactly the same web pages as the search result).

If you find it easier to analyze data presented visually, a demonstration tool called Google Visual Search, provided free by Anacubis, may be right for you. Anacubis's Google Visual Search Tool , http://www.anacubis.com/googledemo/google, uses the Google Web APIs to (among other things) present a visual representation of the sites similar to yours. For example, Figure 2-9 shows a visual representation of sites that are similar to http://www.mechanista.com, a site about antique typewriters, calculators, and other mechanisms.

"The Anacubis Google Visual Search Tool will show similar sites, linked sites, or both."

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