why google doesn't update my inbound links?

[yaelede]

Hi,

I started my link campaign a year ago and it succeeded. Together with some hard SEO work, it boosted my site to the top ten by the end of last June. Google counted 140 inbound links then. I continued to increase the number of quality links. Then after a few months G showed 90 links, though it should have been much more.
Then around the Florida update this number went down to 60, and approximately by the end of November to 24, which has remained unchanged until today.
Other SEs:
ATW 660
AV/Inktomi/MSN above 360

I'm not really complaining about my position (I'm in top ten with PR5 in my very competitive travel biz), though I'm not in the top 5, which would be much better. I'm just curious, maybe there is some problems with my links.
I know that I have more then 300 quality links pointing at my site.

If I check my competitors' incoming links in Google, I can see that they are updated regurarly, but not mine.
My site is being crawled by Googlebot every day for months now.

So I don't understand this at all..

Any advice?

[ciml]

There are a few things that can cause your link count to reduce in Google, but two are more likely.

The people who link to you may have dropped below the PR threshold for showing in a link: search. This does not mean that they stop counting for PageRank or anchor text.

If many of those 140 links were from the same site, then it is quite natural for those links to rise and fall together in PageRank. This makes it not-unusual for a whole bunch of links to drop from the link: search at the same time.

I wouldn't worry about differences between Google's backlink count and other engines. Google are peculiar in having a PageRank threshold for showing backlinks. Also, Google show links to your home page when you search for link:www.example.com while alltheweb.com shows also links to other pages on the domain.

[yaelede]

OK, I know that ATW looks differently at links, but how can it be that G hasn't updated my links since November. Is this factor not so important now? Since I'm ranked pretty well since Brandy, I had to come to this conclusion. Or maybe G has an internal/own/private link record of sites which really counts, and another one which doesn't, but it can be seen when one type link:domain.com?

Though I carefully select sites to link to, there are two sites that have 15-20 subwebs which were reciprocated. All those subwebs have at least PR5, but maybe I should remove these to test G? I give it a try..

[cbpayne]

>but how can it be that G hasn't
>updated my links since November

How do you know it hasn't? Do not rely on the link: command to determine if Google has got your links. This command only returns a representative sample of links. If the links can be crawled and Google knows about them, it probably has taken them into account internally.

[steveb]

[webmasterworld.com...]

[yaelede]

> it probably has taken them into account internally

That's what I hoped to be the reason...