hidden inbound links?

can't find inbound links

[ericli]

I found a website (home page PR8) has more than 20,000 inbound links (link:http://domain.com) and most of the linked pages (link from) are PR7 or better. However, I can't find any inbound link with the domain name in the linked webpages. I checked at least 300 linked pages. Is there a way that inbound links could be hidden? I tracked this website at least 3 months. The situation has never changed in the past 3 months.

[Brett_Tabke]

The default used to be only show links over pr4.

Then try this comparison with your own site.

link:www.webmasterworld.com

vs

.webmasterworld. -site:www.webmasterworld.com

[ericli]

maybe I didn't state it clearly.

First, most of the linked pages are PR7, PR8 or even PR9. All linked pages are from very famous domain names in IT fields.

Second, I mean the links are hidden in the linked pages. For example, searching link:http://www.thedomain.com, [linkeddomain.com...] is showed in the results. However, I can't find any thedomain.com link on the page of page1.htm. That's what I mean "hidden inbound links".

BTW the results have been showed in google more than 3 months that should have been passed at least one update, so I cannot say that links were there but now all are removed.

[Marcia]

It can happen sometimes with rotating banners, which is not uncommon and is very legitimate. BTW, a lot of people are going to lengths to try to obscure their links or source of their PR, and with good reason. I don't know if "vulturous" is a word, but that's how it is out there.

And BTW, Google is messing around with how they're showing backlinks lately; it isn't even half reliable any more.

[internetheaven]

The default is to only show links over pr4.

Isn't that an old piece of knowledge? Google changed a couple of months ago and now show practically anything. Both mine and my clients sites are showing backlinks with PR's 0-4.

[cabbie]

There are ways of hiding links on a page and there are also ways of hiding the actual domain that has the links.But 20000 links are hard to hide.Perhaps the domain has had a 301 redirect from another domain or what you could be looking at, Ericli, is where a domain has pointed itself to a pr8 site and google attributes the backlinks of that pr8 site to the domain you are checking.
You can give a domain a pr10 by doing a stealth redirect to google.com but it doesn't mean anything because as soon as you take of the redirect you lose the pr and of course the domain won't rank for anything in the search engines

[Liane]

.webmasterworld. -site:www.webmasterworld.com is a really useful bit of info ... but all links are not necessarily actual links. In other words, the results show any site which "mentions" your site by way of www.yoursitehere.com without actually making it a live link.

[DerekH]

cabbie wrote

You can give a domain a pr10 by doing a stealth redirect to google.com but it doesn't mean anything because as soon as you take of the redirect you lose the pr and of course the domain won't rank for anything in the search engines

Surely (he says tongue in cheek), shouldn't it match every conceivable search phrase in those circumstances? Including ones not yet typed in?

<grin>

DerekH