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I am relatively new to all this so excuse me if I am posting this in the wrong place.
In June, 2003, I did a link: search on Google to see how many web sites were linking to the site of a non profit org I help out.
Google returned 56 links.
I then did a search for the URL of the organization's web site and got a list of over 300 pages.
I then made up a link page for their web site (they did not have one before) and waited for the bot to spider it.
The link page contained over 300 links, all on topic. None of them required a link in return for linking to this organization. All of them are active.
A new link: search on Google returned 23 links.
I read a FAQ on Google, that link pages should not contain more than 100 links, so I split the links onto four pages, with 90 or less links on each page, and again waited for the bot to spider them.
After all these months, the link: search on Google still returns just 23 links.
The number of links on other search engines went up:
Yahoo 179
Google 23
MSN 69
Altavista 136
Lycos/AllTheWeb 297
but not on Google.
Most of the web site's pages show up in the top 5 to 20 hits in searches on Google for their keywords, so I do not know if I should care.
The Google robot visits the site 2 or 3 times a day, but rarely goes past the index page.
Just to complicate matters, I use a Mac, and do not have access to a PC, so the toolbar is not available to me.
Any ideas about what is going on?
Thank you,
This seems to be contradictional in a sense. If the vast majority was not already indexed then it should be likely that the ones already contained in the index have not very high PR. I don't know your industry, there ARE industries where the really big players have only PR5.
My concern is that the original 56 linking sites must have had a pr of 4 or greater.
I thought that at least some of the 300 additional sites would eventually add to the 56.
IT SEEMED THAT IT CAUSED THE NUMBER OF LINKS TO DROP
Thank you birdstuff, you have made the source of the problem crystal clear!
I did discover from another thread that if I use the link command with a space after the : the number of backlinks returned doubles, even showing links from pages with PR as low as 1. But this is still a tiny fraction of my total backlinks.
This is ALL Google's fault!
When I started doing the link search in June, I entered:
link:my-site.org
This returned the 56 links.
In August or September, I did this same search (selected it from my Favorites menu) and had 0 links returned.
I was shocked, but looking at the URL, I added www and repeated the search.
link:www.my-site.org
This returned the 23 links.
I just thought that Google had changed the way they wanted the URL typed, so I changed the entry in my Favorites menu to add the www, and forgot about it until now.
When birdstuff suggested adding a space, I thought I would try it.
link: www.my-site.org
Adding the space returns 46 links.
Many of the missing 33 are included.
However, five of these links are for a web site with a similar name: www.mysite.org
It has the same name as my site, without the hyphen.
I then tried the original search again.
link:my-site.org
now returns the same 16 links as link:www.my-site.org
I then thought I would see what happened if I added a space to this search.
link: my-site.org
returns 766 links!
However, many of them are not to my site!
A few are to www.mysite.org
Some others are to www.i-mysite.org
And others are to www.aa-mysite.org
While I think that most of the 300 links I know about are included in the 766, this is screwed up!
The Google link command simply won't do much for you. My site has almost 10,000 backlinks listed on Alltheweb but less than 200 on Google.
The fact is that any link: search for a site, with www, or without www, with a space, or without, should return the same results.
In addition, hyphens in the URL should be recognized.
Google should treat www.my-site.org as a different URL than www.mysite.org or www.i-mysite.org
Are sites being penalized, or helped, because another site has, or does not have, a hyphen?
I repeat, this is screwed up!
I would like to hear from others. Does adding, or removing the www and the space, so dramatically alter the number of links returned for your sites? What happens if your site uses a hyphen in its name?
Does this affect everyone, or am I the only one so blessed?
I am certainly not going to expect Google to fix these inconsistencies. They will probably insist that there are perfectly good reasons for driving us crazy!
And by the way, I guess the most important question is which version of the link: search (16 results, 46 results, or 766 results) accurately reflects the links used to determine pr?
Thank you,
Harris
I repeat, this is screwed up!
GOOGLE MAKES ONLY SIMPLE TEXT SEARCH HERE!
Are sites being penalized, or helped, because another site has, or does not have, a hyphen?
Please Advise!
thanks.
Adding a link page to your site would have little affect on your own backlinks, except if it boosted the PR of the pages you linked to.
Google only reports backlinks from pages with a PR of 4 or above
There are several voiced in this forum stating that also PR < 4 is shown.
AllTheWeb shows all backlinks
This is also arguable from what you can read in this forum.
From the above "facts" (no one can say for sure) I for myself concluded two things:
- No SE shows you exactly all backlinks without time lag.
- It does not matter at all.
As of nearly every post on Google:
Collect more links with good anchor text. Positions in the SERPs, NOT number of backlinks is the thing to go for.
In think the moral of this thread is - don't get too hung up over the number of backlinks reported by Google (or PR). Value your SERPS and, to be honest, the number of visitors the site gets.
Answer to the original question
How does Google count backlinks?
Same as everyone else. How it reports them is a different matter.
Here are some basic questions:
1) Did adding link pages, listing links to the pages that already had one way links to us, hurt us in any way?
2) By linking to them, did we, in any way bring their pr below 4, and cause Google to stop displaying them?
3) Would I be better off removing the links pages? If I would be better off, how do I stop Google from counting them? Do I just add to my robot.txt file, or do I need to do something else? Each link page now has a META of NOINDEX, FOLLOW on them.
4) Which version of the link: search (with or without a space or with or without a www - see post 31) accurately displays the links Google uses to determine pr?
5) If pr really has any relevance, shouldn't 300 links from pr1, pr2, and pr3 pages, that are on topic, have more weight than 10 links from pr4 or above pages?
6) While it is fine to say that pr is insignificant, and those of us with Macs should just ignore it, if we link to pages with pro or low pr (because we can't find out their pr), can't we hurt our own pr?
7) We have no control over how other sites link back to us. Almost all of them just use our name. Requests to sites, asking them to use a longer link, with keywords in it, are ignored. Is there anything we can do to compensate for this?
8) Are links that are not reflected in the pr, used in determining the page's position in the SEPRs?
If anyone has this information, I would appreciate answers to these questions.
AllTheWeb shows all backlinks
In my limited experience, while ATW comes closest to the actual number of links I know I have, it still falls at least 50 links short.
Speaking of backlinks, my site has been spidered everyday for a week straight. Is this a good thing? Will I start to see better results because of this? Does this mean more backlinks will be added soon?
Again, I don't have much experience, but my site has been spidered two or three times a day for months. At first all the pages linked to from my index page were also spidered (our content is updated several times a week), but now, only the index page is spidered.
The majority of our pages are in the top 5 to 10 for their keywords. Many are number one, all are in the top 20.
I have no idea how this relates to your site.
We have no control over how other sites link back to us. Almost all of them just use our name. Requests to sites, asking them to use a longer link, with keywords in it, are ignored. Is there anything we can do to compensate for this?
Supply the HTML code for your desired link and many webmasters will use it without altering it.
Same as everyone else. How it reports them is a different matter.
That's the point.
I think the PR6 links are all showing up and also some of the PR5 links are, but not all.
Google needs to add PR3 links to the mix as they are the bulk of my links.
I also have some PR2 links that are fairly new web pages.
Google likes to increase the rating of a web page with time.
I have a lot of former PR3 pages that are now PR4,
and one former PR5 page that has jumped to PR7.
Now hopefully the PR7 page will get more links.
I got the boost to PR7 after I got the google conversion code, is this a "happy accident" or a gigaboost?
Supply the HTML code for your desired link and many webmasters will use it without altering it.
We have a link farm page on our site. It has a number of text links, as well as banners and buttons.
We have also e-mailed some of the major sites that link to us, to no effect.
The problem is that in our non-profit field, the standard link is just the name of the organization. Descriptive text is not used.
Again, is there any way to compensate for this?
Does anyone have any answers to my other questons?
I got the boost to PR7 after I got the google conversion code, is this a "happy accident" or a gigaboost?
I am new to all this. What is the "google conversion code," and a "gigaboost."?
Thank you,
Harris
I presume this can be used as an easy way to tell if backlinks have been updated (by checking if the new title is returned).
This also says something interesting about the inner workings of the beast although exactly what conclusions can be drawn I'm not sure (I'm not sure I really care either).
Kaled.
