funky results on "link:" search

Film at 11

[Ceverett]

OK, on my site if I do a Google(TM) search on

link:www.widget.com

exactly like that, I get no results. But if I search on

link: widget.com

exactly like that (with a space after the ':'), I get 102 results.

This appears to me like its a big part of why searching on
my keywords doesn't have me inside even the first 20 or 30
*pages* of results.

WTH gives here?

[Susanne]

Hi :)
When you search link: widget.com you get search results that have the WORD "link" plus the WORDS "widget.com" So the search itself is slightly faulty and does not show you how many incoming links you have in Google.

However, when you search using link:www.widget.com the search is correct but you say Google gives no results. This is because either you don't have a single incoming link, OR you do have links but Google won't show them to you. Most of the time, Google only shows links from pages with PR above 4. So, even if you do have links belov PR 4 they still count but you cannot see them. Cheers!

[Ceverett]

I have a link from ODP, and another link from a PR6 page of
mine from another website we operate, where we were lucky
and were able to generate a PR7 index page without even
knowing what we were doing. We also have links from an
affiliate program we run that enter our site a few directories
down. I think I have a problem here. Is is because my site has
a PR3?

[Susanne]

Hm, wonder if those affiliate links could cause a problem...? But you still don't have enough incoming links. Even though you have one PR 7 link coming in, it's not that easy to get high PR. You certainly need to work on more genuine and related incoming links.

[Ceverett]

Do you have to have a certain number of links before
google will l;ist any links. One of our competitors is
showing only 14 links on google ... and shows up in the
first page of results for a keyphrases I'd like to do
well on.