Counting Backlinks

How to best use google's "link:" command

[u to the sixth]

I've noticed that when I search for link:www.domain.com that some of the SERPs are from www.domain.com. Isn't the link command designed to return pages that link to the domain but not those from the domain? How can you get an accurate count of backlinks?

[specter]

Hi,

With the Google link command it's impossible to obtain an accurate count of the backlinks;
The tool works on samples and is probably affected from a bug .
Forget it and don't consider as a reliable tool.

[u to the sixth]

"The tool works on samples"
What do you mean samples?

How then do people get backlink counts? I see lots of webmasters saying, "my site has so many backlinks".

[bcolflesh]

The link command only shows a sampling of your backlinks, not all of them.

[u to the sixth]

Is there any rhyme or reason to the links that Google does display, like those with highest PR or the newest in the cache?

Thanks for your help.

[u to the sixth]

Okay I did a search and found some information. I apologize for not checking the archives first before posting a new topic. I did however wonder why Google stopped "supporting" the link command, apparently it's not buggy, Google just had some reasons to weaken it. Any ideas?

Thanks!

[specter]

As already said,link command on Google is not for professional use because it is not accurate and reliable.
It works only for samples and only for web site samples,displaying so only a part of all your backlinks.
In certain situations,this command shows as backlinks some pages of the considered web site;
This probably occours when the web site is only partially indexed while the backlink sampling is performed before the next crawling,resulting as a bug in the software.

[clausroxin]

So is there a reliable way of knowing a site (or page)'s backlinks?

[specter]

No ,that I'm aware,unless than to take note of them by hand!...

[martingale]

you can do it with yahoo search:

linkdomain:example.com -domain:example.com

But who knows if Google has the same links, and if Google is all you care then the answer is "no".

[specter]

you can do it with yahoo search:

Its the same thing:it's unreliable and unaccurate.

But who knows if Google has the same links

Probably not ,due to the different crawling criteria,but this doesn't mean that it works better than Google (see above).
The truth is that actually it doesn't exist a professional and reliable tool for this purpose.