Backlinks - Does Google Count Everything?

[JoeHouse]

Curious about this. I fully realize that google does not always display all backlinks. My question even though they do not always show up on their reports do they all still get counted and credited for?

For example: If I get backlinks a bunch of 0 and 1 pagerank backlinks from sites that are relative does google still count them and credit me for a backlink even if they do not show up when you search on google for total backlink?

I hear yes they know about it and credit you for it but I need to know for sure so I am not wasting my time.

Finally this may sound like a dumb question but I would reall like an anser to it.

Does google count all the backlinks form other search engines such as Yahoo, MSN, AllTheWeb etc....?

For example: your url link on MSN pointing back to your site. Does that count as a backlink?

Are those considered backlinks and are they included in google backlink count?

When you are trying to top your competitors in rankings lets say on google do you look at just google to see how many backlinks you have? Or do you consider all the search engines backlinks as well when trying to get better rankings on google?

Its a mystery to me how this all works. Can someone help explain this to me?

[dailypress]

I am hoping it does count all back links! However, I don’t think anyone really knows the Google algorithm.
Based on experience people may say yes or no!
My 2 cents: Google does count most back links but it may take a while for it to make changes in SERP and re-rank your site.

[Lord Majestic]

Generally search results are excluded from crawling via robots.txt, and thus won't be crawled and therefore not included as backlinks. Note that this concerns pure search only - say if there is an article about your site on MSN in news then (if robots.txt allow that) it might be crawled and you will get a backlink.

[JoeHouse]

My guess is that google does know about them rather quickly. Does not report it all because of fear of algorithm exposure, and does takes a few months or so to have any effect on rankings.

But I am not sure.....Looking for an athority expert on this subject to comment.

[tedster]

Several times in the past Google spokespeople have talked about "changing the way backlinks are weighted". What that means, in exact detail, is of course not public knowledge.

I assume that too many (or too high a percentage) of one "type" of backlink can get you into a place where no more of that TYPE of backlink will count - whether it's directories, potentially paid links, from sites in the same IP range, sites with the same Whois, sites that reciprocate, links in forum and blog signatures, etc. The only type of link that I think Google will consistently count as they increase are those links Google judges to be a freely given vote.

[Robert Charlton]

Does google count all the backlinks form other search engines such as Yahoo, MSN, AllTheWeb etc....?

For example: your url link on MSN pointing back to your site. Does that count as a backlink?

Are those considered backlinks and are they included in google backlink count?

I think you're asking about links in search results pages that link back to your site. In order for these links to help you, someone has to link to the url of the search results page so it will be indexed and crawled by Google. Google has said explicitly that it doesn't like linking to serps pages done in a way that will help these pages get indexed.

Matt Cutts discussed this regarding a question about YouTube's search results showing up in Google....

Search results in search results [mattcutts.com]

As a result of that question, YouTube added a "Disallow: /results" line in its robots.txt file. That’s good because as Google recrawls web pages, we’ll see that and begin to drop those search results.

Google already does similar things with our web search results, Froogle, etc. to try to prevent our web search results from causing problems for any other engines’ index. In general, we’ve seen that users usually don’t want to see search results (or copies of websites via proxies) in their search results.

Matt also cites a new guideline addressing this in Google's quality guidelines [google.com] page....

Use robots.txt to prevent crawling of search results pages or other auto-generated pages that don't add much value for users coming from search engines.

This isn't fully answering your question, as I don't know whether the other engines disallow spidering of their serps or not. This is the kind of thing that engines tend to discuss with each other, though, and generally cooperate on. I can't imagine that any of them likes their results pages spidered, for all sorts of results.