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the space inbetween the link: and www.widgets.com makes alot of difference to what backlinks google sees.
Further to this does google look at the PR of the page linking to you or the site?
Further to this does google look at the PR of the page linking to you or the site?
Yes. My bad. Replace "sites" with "pages" in my previous post...
OK if that is the case then what is the difference between
link:www.widgets.com and ...
link: www.widgets.com
link:www.widgets.com shows links to www.widgets.com with PR4 and higher.
link: www.widgets.com shows pages that contain the terms "link:" and "www.widgets.com"
Like I said in my first post: if you want to find all sites (or better: all "pages") that link to your site, go to Alltheweb.
They just do not show you all the links when you do a link: command. They do not even show all the links PR4 or above, and sometimes they will throw in some PR3s.
Link: is not meant to be a SEO tool, it is for the end users to try and find related sites that are linking to an interesting page.
Of course there are pages that do not pass on their PR, due to google filtering them out speciffically, but that is a different topic.
I found this post because I had the same question the original poster had. If you run one of the Link Popularity checkers I am found dozens of times for Yahoo, AlltheWeb, AltaVista, MSN, but 0 for Google.
My original question is this. Do images with links count as a link? For example a web design firm put a "powered by" logo and a link to their homepage. Does google count that as a link or only TEXT links?
He's completely right:
link: www.example.com is bad syntax.
The correct way to find pages that link to www.example.com is using
link:www.example.com.
There may not be a space between "link:" and "www.example.com".
In any event, my questions still stand about using an inmage as a link. Is that okay, or must it be text to count as a link for PR.
I have been wondering if Google counts a 468x60 image link as a purchased banner, and so doesn't transfer pagerank so readily.
Is this completely wrong?
What BIGDAVE stated doesn't make any sense. I've read on this board and many others that you should do a LINK: command to get an idea of what Google has for you as far as links. SEO companies say to do it and so do "seo experts". So, to say it shouldn't be used for SEO help, I would disagree.
I think you need to reread what I said. I never claimed that it is not useful to use for SEO. I said that it was "not meant to be an SEO tool.
Link: is not meant to be a SEO tool, it is for the end users to try and find related sites that are linking to an interesting page.
It is like using a pair of vise-grips to hammer in a nail. It will work, but it is not what the tool was intended for. But if you do not have any other tool to hammer in that nail, you use the one that you have. And since google does not supply us with a hammer, we will use the vise-grips that they give us.
At no time in that post did I say that link: was not useful. It is. You just should not misunderstand the limits of it's usefulness.
If google were to only count PR4+ links in their algo (as opposed to showing them in link: ) then there would be virtually no PR1-PR2 pages. They would all jump from PR0 to PR3.
The fact is that Google looks for and counts the links coming in to a page before it knows what the PR of that page will end up. That is the progression of how they calculate PR. They make up the list of links after everything else is done.
As far as link: as an SEO tool (as well as all the allin: commands) you have to assume that google will slightly cripple them to keep you from being able to figure things out too well.
If you go to the Advanced Google Search Operator page, they say
link:The query [link:] will list webpages that have links to the specified webpage. For instance, [link:www.google.com] will list webpages that have links pointing to the Google homepage. Note there can be no space between the "link:" and the web page url.
They say "will list webpages that have links to the specified webpage", they do not say "will list all webpages ...". If it was intended to be an SEO tool it would list them all, and rank them in order of the PR passed or at least the PR of the page doing the linking.
Do you understand what I am saying now?
Situation:
If I have 10 links pointing to my site from another domain...and all 10 links are on different pages (PR5) within this other domain, will google see it as 1 inbound link since it is from 1 domain or will google see it as 10 inbound links and give me a higher PR because of it.
Also, what about the same situation as above but instead of 10 links on different pages, they are on different domains... is that better?
thanks
mopek :)
The PR algo smooths it out. I've got 500 links from a PR7 site - but obviously this doesn't give me a PR of 3500 (I wish!) It did, however, boost my PR by 1 point. But being a log scale, this is quite a significant PR boost if the value is already mid-range. There's a lot of anecdotal evidence to suggest that Google would prefer lower value links coming from a wide variety of sources - but of course this has caused the professional spammers to buy lots of sites and manufacture their own PR. I'd say that a handful of links from a PR 5 site is a nice measure of confidence - I'd be very pleased with it. Good luck - we need it these days :)
"Is this completely wrong?"
Links off banners transfer PR exactly like a text link.
BigDave, I apologize for misunderstanding. I now understand what you are saying.
I still am perplexed though why Google shows 0 inbound links to my website, yet Yahoo, Alltheweb, MSN, etc show dozens. I am not trying to use Google as an SEO "tool", just trying to get an idea of what they see as my inbound links. Granted, I only have about 10-20 definite sites that link to me, and only 1 has a PR4, the other are PR3 or less, BUT shouldn't Google show something?
Hmmmm. I have 2 backlinks out of 21 that are pr0 and pr3 that google see's.
Can someone explain this?
Thank you
Brew
Hmmmm. I have 2 backlinks out of 21 that are pr0 and pr3 that google see's.
First off, as far as I know, Google has never given out information on how they decide which links to list. The PR4 myth is only based on ancedotal evidence. Some months either my DMOZ link or my directory.google.com link will not show up, and they are both PR7. Lots of PR4 links never end up showing, but I regularly have PR3 links show up.
While it is probable that Google is using the PR of a page (or the amount of PR passed by a page) to select which links to show, it is almost certain that they do not come from the same dataset. If the toolbar PR data is uploaded a week before the backlinks are calculated, then the actual PR of that PR0 page might be a PR4 by the time it calculates the backlinks.
As for "why" they would show limited results instead of full results? Remember, this is a tool designed for surfers, and the surfer is likely to be more interested in the more important pages that link to the current page than they are in finding out about every little personal page that links to it. The authoritative sites that would provide additional information will have a high enough PR to show up.
I have seen examples on the web which dont have even a single back link in Google and have a PR2. That may mean that that website has links which are PR3 or below and they pass the PR to get the page it's PR2 and still dont show anything using links:domain.com!
Links off banners transfer PR exactly like a text link.
But text links are probably more valuable because they also have anchor text in them ;o)
How does PR affect crawling frequency and depth? Is this a domain or a page issue?
Sid
Thanks
Exp...
Google Web Search Features
Who Links To You [google.com]
"Some words, when followed by a colon, have special meanings to Google. One such word for Google is the link: operator. The query link:siteURL shows you all the pages that point to that URL. For example, link:www.google.com will show you all the pages that point to Google's home page. You cannot combine a link: search with a regular keyword search."
Seems like they may have forgotten to update this page.
Strangely I seem to be in a weird situation with one site where I have almost 800 backlinks showing in Google, but in alltheweb I have only 6, altavista 10, etc. Very bizarre and I have no idea why.
