Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
The results seem strange. On my site the only links that show up are two old (currently non-existent) pages from my own site. Even though there are a few high ranked sites that link to it, and many medium ranked sites. I know google has indexed these pages.
I tried the command on several other sites and got strange lists ... often a lot of links, but not the important ones that I'd expect to see.
What am I missing?
What am I missing?
You haven't missed anything, you've just discovered the fact that it's a command which is not reliable or accurate. In fact it's next to useless.
Yahoo! provides a far more reliable link search.
TJ
The query [link:] will list webpages that have links to the specified webpage.[google.com...]
Google never says that the link: operator will list "all" webpages that link. And in fact, it never has. In the beginning, the result was restricted to linking pages over PR4. But then a few year ago it was changed to show a sampling of links, no matter the PR. So now there can be a long established link from a PR9 page that isn't shown on a link: query.
On Google, the link: report is just a taste, sampler. Not suited for analyzing or reverse engineering the regular search results at all. Which is the way Google intends it -- they are protecting the recipe for their "secret suce".
Yes, Yahoo is willing to give you 1,000 results with no restriction other than that number. In many cases, this means every link they know about. And it's not a terribly wrong assumption - at least in broad strokes - that if Yahoo knows about a link, so does Google.
