Backlinks not found by Google

Where are my backlinks?

[AmishJohn]

I've noticed that some of the web sites that link to mine do not show when I click "backlinks" on the Google Toolbar. My first thought was that these sites must be hiding their links to me from Google. But if they are it is not at all obvious what they are doing. (no JavaScript, cached page looks just like the real page).

I then went to some sites that I have linked to (with a plain HTML link on a link page that gets refreshed by Google daily and the link page has PR4) and found that my link to them does not appear when I visit their site and click "backlinks". My links page has been in existence for at least 6 months.

What's going on?

Does Google ignore links on "link pages"?

[Susanne]

Hi!
Google won't show all incoming links to a site, and doesn't count all of them. People say only links from pages with pagerank 4 will show. And many dynamic links don't count at all.
I can't really speculate why your link to other sites don't show even though it's a plain text link from a pagerank 4 page. Maybe because, as I said above, Google simply won't show you exactly all the links. It would make it easier for spammers maybe, if every single links was shown. Cheers!

[gsx]

Google has 'dropped' backlinks for certain sites this month with no explanation. Perfectly acceptable PR4 and above links are not appearing. It is more common than ever not to yield any results at all using the site:... search facility.

[ExtremeExports]

I've been noticing the same thing. I have some backward links (relevant to my webtopic, and with sites that have a PR5 or higher) and when I click on backward links on my toolbar, it shows I have none! This is very frustrating. :-(

[Skier]

I'm missing most of my backlinks on Google's bar results too. I worked hard to get them and am also frustrated.
Missing links include pages that have been significant sources of referral volume for months.

However, although these sites have home pages with high PR, I have never gone back to check what the PR of the actual referring pages is. I used the home page PR to check if the site was "acceptable" and no more.

I assume the problem is that the source pages do not meet Google's criteria - even if the home page of the site is highly ranked.

[glengara]

How is G showing the links?
Is it as a lower than usual ratio, eg 40 of 160?

[Skier]

G shows mostly internal links, plus a few very old external links. The ratio of external is hard to say since I haven't kept a record. My guess is 10-20% of the total externals, and zero of links created in the last three months.

Maybe this Christmas. That would be nice...

[Chimera Veracity]

Depends on the site and if google sees it or thinks it is a link farm. If you're not using any templates generated from programs, don't use the word links heavily or make it look like a link farm you should be fine. Try to make it look different. Have 5 links pages all by categories.

Besides, google's getting hit right now by major link exchange. I have no doubts they're programming ways to sift through some of the link farms being created by SEO marketers.

[homegirl]

One thing to keep in mind: even if Google isn't showing all the inbound links, it still counts the ones that aren't being shown. I find it shows or provides access to about half of its reported link results unless the number of links is fairly small- in which case, it usually shows all.

To make this clearer, if you use the link:http://www.yoursite.com and it reports back Results 1-10 of about 200; you'll most likely be able to view/access 100 of those 200 but ALL 200 links count toward PR.

There's a small discussion on this in [webmasterworld.com ] that might be helpful.

[AmishJohn]

OK, so Google will only show a subset of all real backlinks with some undefined criteria for what is shown and what is not.

If the list is incomplete and only vaguely connected to page rank why show it at all? Just to confuse spammers?

If the purpose is to help surfers find related sites, being incomplete makes it a less than ideal tool. Furthermore having such a weak tool will just encourage serious surfer to use other search engines.

[homegirl]

I highly doubt Google would employ such a technique to confuse spammers. It's still a useful tool; in fact, Google might have been the first engine to offer backwards linking and in the early days, you might have been able to see all the links but now, I think they deliberately make the list incomplete for their own purposes.

Caring about backwards linking became important because people caught on to the importance of inbound links for PR (all on Google).

If tracking inbound links is important to you for purposes other than ranking highly on Google, then it looks like FAST (AlltheWeb) has an excellent link tool that is complete (provides a complete list). Google may eventually re-think its position on providing an incomplete list if this is truly an important feature to the majority of its public and not simply those in SEO.