Invisible incoming links

Does google hide links?

[world end soon]

I am a little confused because when using the google toolbar, I have noticed that my backward links do not include all the prominent places on the web where links exist.

For example one of our sites has been listed on Yahoo and google for many months, yet yahoo does not show up in the backward links.

We have scores of incoming links to another website, mostly from sites in the google directory, yet only a hanful show up in the backward links search.

Has anyone else noticed this?

[IanTurner]

There are many ways links can fail to show up.

If the link is via a redirect or javascript it won't show up. Robots.txt bar on the links page will do the same thing.

Additionally Google only shows some of the incoming links.

[pageoneresults]

Instead of following backwards links, try searching for the term your domain name with the www. and .com.

[vitaplease]

world_end_soon,

as an addition to what Ian Turner said, the main reason could be that the pages linking to you carry to little pagerank. Google generally only lists pagerank 3 or 4 and higher in the back-links overview.

Some very prominent directories such as e.g. DMOZ/ODP can have very pagerank categories as low as PR2. You can still find these pages in Google by searching for your own site name without www and com as pageoneresults suggests.

Another option is using FAST's backlink search option.