"link:" doesn't show all indexed links?

[DylanW]

I know this is addressed here [webmasterworld.com], but the listed links didn't give me anything (just kept asking me for a login).

I've searched for links to our site in Google recently (I'm pretty sure I noticed this well before Florida), and I keep noticing that several pages that do link to our site (not just our site, the exact URL I'm searching for) don't show up in the "link:" search result--even though they're indexed, and the cache shows that Google has indexed a version of the page with the link.

What's worse is, these aren't sites that have anything at all to do with ours; these are sites that have us in their links directory (but we haven't exchanged links them).

So, what I'm wondering is, are these the main links that affect our rankings? Is there some reason Google might have filtered the other sites out of this list (maybe something to do with our link exchanges?) Or am I just being paranoid? :)

[rfgdxm1]

Take a look at this SERP from the updated datacenter:

[google.com...]

Conspicuous by its absence: the link from the home page at [dmoz.org...] to this second level cat. That is a missing PR9 link. Either Google had a data loss, the link: command is buggy, or Google purposely has chosen only to show some.

[Bones]

rfgdxm1, try that same link: query with a trailing slash on the end.

[ladylil]

oh, oh, oh!

I been noticing this over the past week as well. In fact, if I do a text search for my site's listing in google directory, it says "not found", but if I drill down through the directories it is listed!

It's killing me. I've dropped out of the top 30 from a solid #3 ranking which I've had for over 3 years!

Please let me know what you find out.