Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
When I go to Google's Advanced Search page, it shows only 56 sites linking to us. We've submitted those sites to Google, just to be sure Googlebot visits them and sees that inbound link.
When we log in to Google Webmaster Tools we see that Google recognizes 680 inbound links. Now, a lot of these are just links from our site to our site, but a lot of sites show up in this report that don't show up when you use the Advanced Search.
Why the discrepancy? Why won't Google recognize all those inbound links?
You're better off using Y to check inbound links...
Don't think that just because G doesn't list the other inbounds that they don't exist...
G knows about them...
And don't think that just because you have 150 links that it will raise your PR...it's not that easy...:)
[edited by: Terabytes at 3:15 pm (utc) on Mar. 23, 2007]
Google intentionally doesn't show all the links when using the link: command. It has been this way for a few years now. It was generally done as a way to keep SEOs from reverse engineering their algo by scanning the inbound links for competitor sites etc.
Google recently started showing more links via the webmaster tools area so there is now a discrepancy between the two.
In general, if a link to your site is out there on a page that google can find, it knows about it whether it shows you or not.
Google intentionally doesn't show all the links when using the link: command.
Note this on Google's Webmaster Help Center [google.com]...
You can perform a Google search using the link: operator to find a sampling of links to any site.
It took a lot of screaming to get Google to add the word "sampling," but if you look through their site, you'll see that they still are sloppy about it in some places...
Advanced Google Search Operators
[google.com...]
The query [link:] will list webpages that have links to the specified webpage. For instance, [link:www.google.com] will list webpages that have links pointing to the Google homepage....
This is really vague. Google ought to get it together and perhaps even return a clarifying message on the link: serps page. Why continue to confuse people about this?
The atlwebguy message shows how many people can't believe Google is giving away useless results with the link: command and, indirectly, how many users think the Google search results are the all available sites in the web ordered by quality.
Google does not provide tools for gaining insight into their algo. That includes the toolbar. ;)
It's pretty reasonable.
Google does not provide tools for gaining insight into their algo
Call it as you want. Giving away an utility with tricky results is something that only a big branded company can do. If I give this results in my own search engine, people just will think I have a malfunctioning engine and they just will go away but it's Google, so people ask "What I'm doing wrong as I can't see all my link listed here?".
Not that pagerank should be monitored by webmasters at all.
It doesn't mean a thing anymore.
Apart of a quarterly report on how Google sees one's internal site structure and individual page weight.
But...
We've convinced about 150 sites to link to us. So we should have a great PageRank, but we don't. It's only a 5.
Unless you got inbounds from PR7, 8, 9, 10 pages...
150 sites, PR5 is... normal.
