Link: and Site: utilities yield incorrect results

[doughayman]

I've been having a myriad of website ranking problems since that fateful day of June 4th (I think that was the date). In any event, I notice that there are some anomolies with some of Google's command line tools, and I was wondering if anyone had any thoughts on the subject:

Disclaimer: My effected site has several subdirectory based
subordinate sites. The structure of this site is:

www.domain.com/subdir1/home.htm
www.domain.com/subdir2/home.htm
.
.
www.domain.com/subdirN/home.htm

1) Link: Tool --> My external and internal links seem to be
reflected fairly well in the WMT area. However, if I enter
the Google command line tool commands of:

a) link:www.domain.com OR

b) link:www.domain.com/subdir1/home.htm

both of these above commands only returns 1 external link (yes,
just a single external link) This is true for all LINK commands
used in conjunction with each of my subdirectory sites. Moreover,
the external link that show up for my root domain
(link:www.domain.com), returns a link which emanates from a
#*$!/spam link directory page (this was being returned even
a couple of years ago, I recall, before my ranking woes began).

Anyone else ever see this tool behave like this ? Is there an
implication here ?

2) Site: Tool --> I mentioned this is another thread, but I
figured I'd mention it again here. About 2 weeks ago (and this
happens every couple of months) the # of links returned by
the command:

site:www.domain.com

dropped by about 20 %. This happens over and over again, every
couple of months. The # will continue building back up over
time, and then wham !, it will see a reduction of about 15-20 %.
This is usually always accompanied by an across-the-board
degradation in the SERPs for all keywords that I track.

I would greatly appreciate any comments on the above.

Thanks and regards,

Doug

[tedster]

1) The link: operator has always been strange, and Google does not intend it as anything other than a sampling of links - the size of that sample always changes. Seeing just one external link in the link: operator sounds buggy, I'd say, but it doesn't mean much of anything, especially if your WMT panels show something sane.

2) The site: operator has been acting up for a month - ever since the Halloween goblins we discussed in the November SERPs thread [webmasterworld.com]. It's been acting up for sites that are seeing ranking troubles as well as sites that are not.

The structure of this site is:

www.domain.com/subdir1/home.htm
www.domain.com/subdir2/home.htm

Try site:domain.com/subdir1/home.htm and so on - you'll sometimes see urls that don't show on site:domain.com

[edited by: tedster at 8:18 pm (utc) on Dec. 6, 2008]

[doughayman]

Thanks for your reply, Ted. There seems to be a "slight" difference between what is yielded between:

site:www.domain.com/subdirN/home.htm AND
site:domain.com/subdirN/home.htm

Nothing appreciable though for me.

[tedster]

But if you add up all the separate /subdirN/ numbers, it almost always comes out a good bit different from the basic site:example.com results. I've seen differences of 30% higher or more. So my point - the basic site: numbers do NOT report on all the urls that are actually indexed.