link: search shows only internal links

Google's link: implies I have no external links

[Phil_Payne]

I have (or had) about 170 or so genuine inbound links from other mainframe practitioners and the press - such as The Register and Computer Weekly.

Google now shows none of these at all - just half a dozen or so internal links.

Nothing else seems to be affected. The site: search produces the right results, and every keyword search comes up with quite acceptable results - I'm still indexed and presented on SERPS pages quite satisfactorily.

I have a suspicion - from a few sites I found using Yahoo's site: search - that my URL was in some text scraped by spammers from a Wikipedia entry. You can see this by doing a site: for my company on Yahoo and looking at the last few pages - they're all in the same style and obviously produced by click collectors.

This was no fault of mine. Is Google likely to re-recognise my (many years' worth) of links again at some point?

[annej]

I just use other search engines to find backlinks anymore.

Used to be Google at least showed you inbound links from high PR pages. Now it just seems to be random and meaningless.

Are you still doing as well as ever in search engine results? If you have plunged there then it is quite another problem.

[Phil_Payne]

Maybe I'm just a crap author, but it seems that no one (not here, and not on Usenet) actually seems to understand what I write.

a) It's not the paucity of link references I get when I do a Google link: search, it's their total and utter absence. Lycos and Yahoo still show plenty, but Google shows NONE. Zero. Not a reduced sample. NONE.

b) As I believe I also wrote quite clearly - nothing else has changed. Nothing. Ranking is fine, PR is still crap but alsways was and it doesn't seem to matter because I still get #1 on my (thankfully rare) keywords.