Backward links not working

[Jaguars]

I am getting a pagerank of 4 on my site and I can search in google uk for allinurl: mysite.co.uk and it gives me 54 pages and I have other sites linking to this site that are also ranked in google, as well as having a PR3.
When i do a backwards links on the site, it shows as Your search - link:http://www.mysite.co.uk - did not match any documents. I know for a fact that there are linking pages in google that point to my site. Why is this happening.
It also happens to the sites that are linking to me, but not some other sites I go to. I assume my google bar is working because it works on some sites.

Also, if I am getting a PR of anything, does that mean I am not penalised, or can I still have a PR of say 3 and be getting penalised?

Thank you for your time.

[nativenewyorker]

Jaguars,

Welcome to Webmaster World.

Google recognizes all the backlinks that are pointing to yourdomain.tld when calculating your PR. But the "link:" command will only list pages pointing to "yourdomain.tld" if they have a PR of 4 or greater. Pages with a PR of 3 or less pointing to "yourdomain.tld" will not be displayed.

It sounds like your low PR is due to being a relatively new site. My recommendation is continue to build quality content and find external sites with high PR pages to link to you.

Also read up on Google's Webmaster Guidelines [google.com] recommendation to optimize your site.

Ted

[Jaguars]

Thanks,
as for the sites being new sites, they have been up and spidered by google for 3 years. Long enough I would have thought.
7 sites are on the same IP address. Is there ANY way to find out if a site is penalised by something like that and if I seperate the sites to individual IP addresses, or at least IP addresses with the C block numbers different, will google forgive me and lift any penalty, or is a penalty for life?

Thank you for your time in advance.

[nativenewyorker]

I would doubt that you have been penalized unless you have been practicing very aggressive search engine optimization techniques.

Are you cross linking every page of your 7 domains to each other? site1.tld links all 50 pages to all 50 pages of site2.tld, site3.tld, site4.tld, etc?

Are you using hidden text? (i.e. white text on white background or black text on black background)

Are you using hidden links? (i.e. linked 1x1 transparent gifs)

Penalties can be and have recently been lifted. There is a Webmaster World member named GoogleGuy, a senior Google techie, who acknowledged lifting some Google penalties [webmasterworld.com] recently.

Despite being around for 3 years, it is possible for you to have low PR for your pages. You need to build link poularity by acquiring inbound links from quality pages with high PR.

You may want to do a site search to read some of GoogleGuy's prior suggestions or read the many tips in the Google forum for more advice about optimizing for Google.

Ted

[Jaguars]

No, as far as I am aware there is no bad spamming, although 3 years ago SE optimisation was a bit different and pages have not really been changed since. Only thing it could be is a link to all default pages on each domain has been added to a lot of pages on each domain. All on same IP address.

<a href=http://www.mydomain1.com/></a>
<a href=http://www.mydomain2.com/></a>
<a href=http://www.mydomain3.com/></a>
<a href=http://www.mydomain4.com/></a>

etc.
That is also not on all of the pages. Although some domains have it on all pages. Maybe 60-100 pages on each site.

It was more to get them spidered than to get page rank as I assumed that once 1 link had been found then others would be ignored.
So I can still get penalised and show a page rank!

Will page rank still be passed on to a GOOD site if I link to them or will they also get a penalty?

Thank you for your time again.

[nativenewyorker]

Jaguars,

SEO has certainly changed in the last year, let alone 3 years. When you originally set up your site, it was common practice to use doorway pages and 1x1 hidden gif links. These days, they are heavily frowned upon.

I would suggest doing a site search on crosslinking and also on linking + hubs + spokes.

You may be treading on thin ice by having the heavy crosslinking. Even if you are not currently penalized, a competitor may report you.

You can reduce the risk of your crosslinking by removing some of the links such that you create a hub with spokes and also increasing the amount of inbound links from sites on a different IP.

Inbound links cannot hurt a site. The site that receives an inbound link will derive a PR benefit from your site. It is only when a site links out to a bad neighborhood (i.e. link farms or Free for All {FFA} sites), that they can draw penalties.

Setup a sitemap to get your sites spidered. If you have a large sitemap > 100 links, then setup multiple sitemaps.

Ted