When searching for links to a site, how can I construct a search such
that the results will omit internal links as well as links from
another domain/site that I specify?

Hello,

By using a couple options this is easily accomplished. I'm going to
use the main page of Google as an example, but you can use any search
URL that you wish.

In order to first search for links to a particular site, you preface
the query with a link:[blah] part. In our example let's put this into
the search box:

ex.
Google Search:
link:://www.google.com/
URL:
://www.google.com/search?q=link:://www.google.com/

This will return the pages which have a link on it to Google's main
page. In order to start narrowing it down by removing domains, and
internal links, let's take out all sites that end with google.com
(internal links on Google's main server to its own about page). This
can be accomplished with -site:[blah].

ex.
Google Search:
link:://www.google.com/ -site:google.com
URL:
://www.google.com/search?q=link:://www.google.com/+-site:google.com

As you can see there are no longer any entries which are from
google.com. The second returned result is from reasearchbuzz.com and
if you want to remove results from this domain name as well, you can
just add it to the end of the previous search like this.

ex.
Google Search:
link:://www.google.com/ -site:google.com -site:researchbuzz.com
URL:
://www.google.com/search?q=link:://www.google.com/+-site:google.com+-site:researchbuzz.com

Using this methoid, you can try how things work for other pages by
changing the link:[blah] part of the query or the restricted domains
added to the query. Hope I helped answer your question!


Search Strategy:

none, but Google has a nice page on how to refine searches linked
below


Additional Links:

Help on advanced search techniques:
://www.google.com/help/


Thank you for the opportunity to answer your question, if you require
more information, please clarify the question, or if you find this
answer satisfactory, please feel free to rate it. Thank you!

skermit-ga

Unfortunately, I think that skermit-ga's answer is incorrect.  These
searches do not result in all pages (other than those on omitted
sites) that link to Google, but rather, all pages that contain the
phrase "link:://www.google.com/".

Indeed, it appears that if you search for link:://www.google.com
in conjunction with any other term, the results will only include
pages with the phrase "link:://www.google.com".

I think that the best solution is to search for:
"://www.google.com" -site:google.com -site:researchbuzz.com

This search will pull up some sites that contain the phrase
"://www.google.com" but not an actual link to Google.  But for the
most part, the search results will contain links to Google, and
moreover will not be on Google or Researchbuzz pages (in this
example).

justaskscott-ga,

Have you read this from the help page on searching?

"
Who links to you? 

Some words, when followed by a colon, have special meanings to Google.
One such word for Google is the link: operator. The query link:siteURL
shows you all the pages that point to that URL. For example,
link:www.google.com will show you all the pages that point to Google's
home page. You cannot combine a link: search with a regular keyword
search.
"

I used it as correctly as possible. The reason why you did not see the
results you expected is that "You cannot combine a link: search with a
regular keyword search." You can however use the -site: to narrow this
down. I've done this in the past many a time to check up on who has
particular pages on my domain linked to with/without my permission.
Thanks for the comment though, it shows we have a checks/balances
system on here.

skermit-ga

I respectfully disagree.

There are 246,000 results to a search for link:://www.google.com -

://www.google.com/search?num=30&hl=en&lr=&ie=ISO-8859-1&safe=off&q=link%3Ahttp%3A%2F%2Fwww.google.com

There are 482 results to a search for "link:://www.google.com" -

://www.google.com/search?num=30&hl=en&lr=&ie=ISO-8859-1&safe=off&q=%22link%3Ahttp%3A%2F%2Fwww.google.com%22

This is exactly the same number of results as produced by skermit-ga's
search for link:://www.google.com/ -site:google.com

Surely there are more than 482 links to Google on the World Wide Web,
other than on Google's web pages.  (And just as surely, there are not
245,500 internal links to Google.)

If you include the term -site:researchbuzz.com, you get 480 links,
whether or not the term link:://www.google.com is in quotation
marks.

It seems clear that the searches suggested by skermit-ga result only
in web pages with the phrase "link:://www.google.com/", not in all
external web pages that link to Google.