Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
link:www.mysite.com shows 56 links and
link: mysite.com shows 801 links
just wondering what the difference between the two searches are.
link:www.mysite.com shows 56 links and
link: mysite.com shows 801 links
The search...
link: mysite.com
...with a space in between link: and mysite.com, isn't showing links. It's essentially a search for link and mysite.com.
For the link: operator to work, you can't have a space between it and the url you're searching.
I have something to ad to that. I recently had a rep from a company that our site does alot of advertising with come and in and of course try to keep us as the good customer that we are. He printed out the link: mysite results from google and said that these are all of the links from our search engine to your site. I pointed out that when I search link:www.widgets.com that Google is showing the most 'relevant' links to our site.
Is this a true statement? even though his search with link: widgets.com did show all of our links are they all the most important links?
These are also all paid links. Which I've read Google would be handling differently in the future. If we decide to cut back our marketing efforts with this company I would hate for our good standing in Google to be affected because of a few links.
The link report (in either place) is also not an indicator of whether those links are influencing rankings in any way - it's just Google saying "these links are there ".
I pointed out that when I search link:www.widgets.com that Google is showing the most 'relevant' links to our site.
As tedster points out, this is only a partial list of your links. The list returned by the link: operator is random, and the links are not necessarily the most relevant at all.
Is this a true statement? even though his search with link: widgets.com did show all of our links are they all the most important links?
Again, this search with the space is not a search for backlinks to your site. This is search for pages that include the word link and the term widgets.com. These terms might be included on some pages that link to your site, but it is not a link search.
Unless widgets.com is your brand name and widgets is your main keyword, though, links containing anchor text other than "widgets.com" will generally be more helpful to your ranking. Searching for link: widgets.com will not show pages containing such anchor text links.
For more information on the link: operator in Google, see...
[google.com...]
I recommend using Yahoo's Site Explorer to get a more complete listing of your backlinks.
[edited by: Robert_Charlton at 6:20 am (utc) on May 12, 2007]
