This may be new to some of you or old news to others. But, in Google, Yahoo, etc., you can filter results by what is contained in the url of webpages. I know that this doesn’t make much sense right now, but I will do my best to try to explain.

If you go to Google, you can type in “inurl:” and search for certain words or phrases contained in indexed urls. For example, I can go and type in inurl:forum, and thousands of sites will come back with the word “forum” in their urls. Ok, whatever…big deal! But, if you combine this function with the “site:” function, you can get even better results.

Let’s say you want to get some .edu backlinks: Go to your search engine and type in “site:.edu inurl:forum” and you will get some .edu related forums. (Just make sure the site is not nofollow). You can do the same thing with blogs: “site:.edu inurl:blog” You could even take this a step further and find sites related to your niche: “site:.edu inurl:blog dogs”

Now, I experimented with this a little bit and it seemed to work out pretty well. But, I wanted better results (sites with traffic). So, I tried these examples on Alexa.org (without the site:.edu). I basically went to the advanced search and typed in inurl:forum, took the top 10,000 using the Traffic Filter, and filtered out adult sites. Voila! Potential backlinks! Experiment a little…use inurl:submit.php, inurl:submiturl, etc.