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Two questions about the link: operator

 
 

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Question: “How accurate is Google's backlink-check, link: ?”

Answer: Google's backlink check only shows a small, random subsample of all known backlinks for a domain. To get a more complete view you can register your site with Google's Webmaster Console, where you will be able to take a look at virtually all backlinks that Google knows for your registered site.

Question: “If you have inbound links from reputable sites but those sites do not show up in a link:webname search, does that mean you are not getting any 'credit' in Google's eyes for having those inbound links?”

Answer: Since the link:-search is only a random subsample, it does not mean that if a site does not show up, it will not be credited. Sign up to the Webmaster Console and check the list there to get an excellent view of which backlinks are credited for your site.
0:01
Sven Heß from Wiesbaden, Germany asks: “How accurate is Google's backlink-check, link: ? Are all nofollow backlinks filtered out or why does Google/MSN show quite more backlinks or more results?”

0:13
The short answer is that historically we only had room for a very small percentage of backlinks because websearch was the main part and we didn't have a ton of servers for link: queries and so we have doubled or increased the amount of backlinks that we show over time for link: but it is still a subsample.

0:32
It is a relatively small percentage and I think that that's a pretty good balance because if you just automatically show a ton of backlinks for any website then spammers or competitors can, you know, use that to try to reverse engineer someones ranking and you don't necessarily want someone spying on your rankings and try to figure out how they can compete with you by getting every single link that you got.

0:53
What we do instead is a nice compromise. If you register your site in google.com/webmasters, our webmaster console, then you can see all or practically all of the backlinks that we know about you. So a vast vast vast, you know, majority of the backlinks that we know about are there in Google's webmaster console.

1:13
So you can look at a subsample for any website or any page on the web but if you want to see pretty much the full dump of what we know about, you can see if for your own site but not necessarily for your competitors.

1:24
We think that's a pretty good compromise and so that is probably the policy that we'll have going forward.

1:30
San Diego Tim from San Diego says: “If you have inbound links from reputable sites but those sites do not show up in a link:webname search, does that mean you are not getting any 'credit' in Google's eyes for having those inbound links?

1:42
No it doesn't. link: only shows a sample, you know, a subsample of the backlinks that we know about and it's a random sample. So it's not like we only show the hight PageRank backlinks, thats what we used to do, and then anyone who had a PageRank 4 or below wasn't able to see their backlinks because they weren't in the high PageRank, they weren't getting high PageRank links. So we made it more fair by randomizing which backlinks we would show and we also sort of doubled the number of backlinks that we would show at that time.

2:09
Now whats interesting is, if you only show links that flow PageRank or that we trust or that are, you know, don't have the Nofollow, then people could kinda reverse engineer that and say: “Oh, I'll try to get the links that are really valuable”. So we show the links that do, you know, carry a lot of credit in our system when we also show the links that we don't really trust or don't really carry a lot of credit in our system. So it is truly just a random sample of, you know, stuff that's Nofollow, stuff that's followed, stuff that we do believe a lot, stuff that we don't trust as much.

2:39
So just because you don't see one particular link in link: doesn't mean that it doesn't or does flow reputation, PageRank, whatever you want to refer to it as.

2:49
If it's your own site you can use Google's webmaster console. Sign up and get a very complete, basically the vast majority of links that we know about, as a dump, that you can even download as a CSV file. So if you do wanna get a really good idea of your backlinks thats the place to go and get a pretty exhaustive list of your links according to Google.