Link: operator is now a smaller fraction of backlinks

[Western]

I've checked site:www.example.com for a half dozen sites, unrelated to each other, and where they were showing thousands of backlinks earlier this week they are not showing a few dozen today.

Some of these are large corporate sites. Anyone notice the same thing?

[edited by: tedster at 10:50 pm (utc) on Aug. 20, 2008]
[edit reason] use "example.com" [/edit]

[tedster]

I can't say I've noticed that - but I don't usually watch the Google link: operator results, since whether the numbers are large or small, they only ever list a sampling of backlinks.

From your report, it seems that Google has decided to restrict the public link: information quite a bit more than in the recent past. I'm not sure what the logic would be behind that, since the word has certainly been spreading about Google's link: results being limited. Maybe they are hoping to reduce usage even more - hard to say what their thinking is.

[martinibuster]

...word has certainly been spreading about Google's link: results being limited.

Word has been spreading for over four years now and people still don't understand it's a sampling.

Lots of misunderstanding about the Google SERPs. Remember the confusion about if their sites rank top 3 for allintitle/allinanchor/etc. then why aren't they ranking in the real SERPs?

The best thing that can happen to those who want to optimize their sites for better ranking is for Google to remove the green PR meter from the toolbar. That might disturb link sellers for a little while until someone develops a toolbar metric to fill the vacuum. But it might also force webmasters to look at more useful metrics and become better at what they do.

[tedster]

For entertainment value, I just checked the link: operator results for a few of the biggest domains I could think of - and I see what you mean. The very biggest may show a few thousand backlinks, but we know there are millions.

That makes me wonder who Google is trying to serve with this kind of support for the link: operator - the curiosity searcher?

[Lord Majestic]

if their sites rank top 3 for allintitle/allinanchor/etc. then why aren't they ranking in the real SERPs?

Probably because real SERPs take into account more params than just title/anchor.

link: stats shown by Google are totally far away from reality - it is simply not worth using it, which is probably Google wanted to achieve with their tweaks.

[martinibuster]

>>>the curiosity searcher?

Certainly not the algo cracker or SEO.

[activeco]

Yes, this is comparing apples and oranges, but allinanchor gives more reliable picture in Google, at least for the domain name in anchors. If you can figure out the aproximate ratio of domain vs. keywords in anchors then you can come very close.

E.g.
allinanchor:example.com/

more esoteric (with less results!):
allinanchor:example.com/*

or external links only:
allinanchor:"example.com/" -site:example.com