Is a Google link: search accurate enough?

by 8 replies
9
I'm checking out my competitor in Google who's currently ranking first for the keywords I'm targeting.

A link: search on their site turns up 2 backlinks. I just discovered Backlink Watch.com so I tried a search on there too. It turned up over 600 backlinks for the site, more than 2 thirds of which are dofollow.

So why doesn't Google know of all these backlinks and do they matter?
#search engine optimization #accurate #google #link #search
  • Google doesn't show all the backlinks to a page.
    For your own site use google's webmaster tools. For other sites, use Yahoo Site Explorer.
    • [1] reply
    • So even though they don't show up in Google when doing a link: search, they still improve the ranking of the page in Google?
  • Correct.

    Link: is just a sample of the links Google knows about. In part Google does this to protect sites. Otherwise it would be too easy to copy the link graph of another website.

    Like KirkMcD stated, you can find a much larger sample of links to your own site by signing up for Google's webmaster tools.

    If you want to find out if Google "knows" about a specific link simply check to see if the webpage your link is on is indexed by Google. If so, you can be confident Google is at the very least aware of your link. (This doesn't mean that it's necessarily passing juice, however.)
  • (1) Link: site.com turns about around 1% of my total backlinks on average
    (2) No, it doesn't matter that google doesn't list all of these backlinks. Just because Google doesn't list something as a backlink with the "link" search doesn't mean that google doesn't "know" of that backlink.
  • SEOMoz did some research on Google's link: command recently, it showed that Google returned from 04% to 4.4% of known links. It's very broken! Use Yahoo Site Explorer, Majestic SEO or SEOMoz Linkscape if you want decent data about other site's backlinks, Google Webmaster Tools should give you a good idea for your own site.
    • [1] reply
    • The Google link: function is intentionally broken in order to hide how their algorithm works.
  • giving backlinks for all search engines concept is different , google has different yahoo has different
    • [1] reply
    • Well google will not show all the backlinks ever. The reason is simple, they don't want to give away the secrets. We all know that back links make up one part of the page rank system, therefore google likes to protect some of the hard work while yahoo will release ther information to your competitors.
      When backlinks do show up on Google they are often from only the highest quality sites; those that are already considered credible themselves and are undeniably relevant to the linked website
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    Is a Google link: search accurate enough?

    I'm checking out my competitor in Google who's currently ranking first for the keywords I'm targeting. A link: search on their site turns up 2 backlinks. I just discovered Backlink Watch.com so I tried a search on there too. It turned up over 600 backlinks for the site, more than 2 thirds of which are dofollow.