Whitehatmedia News

03/04/2007  |  MSN and inbound links

For those using tools like marketleap, linkdomain or inurl on a regular basis, you may have noticed that, MSN does not return any backlinks (or inbound links) on those tools any longer.According to Marketleap: “MSN has recently discontinued reporting results for the operator ‘link:’. As such our Link Popularity tool is no longer able to generate reports for MSN.  We will be removing MSN from our Link Popularity tool shortly.”It seems that MSN has turned off this functionality because of a too broad use of this kind of tools by illegitimate user, mainly for data mining.Strange enough, the bigger Search Engines that are Google and Yahoo do not seem too bothered by giving out their link data. Even though Google does not report every links, it still gives a rough idea.All the SEO professionals in the world probably screamed in the same time when they noticed what MSN had just done… What will be the next move of the third biggest Search Engine?