How does Link: work?

Backlinks

[devilseye7130]

Hi,

Does any one know how to track the backlinks on Google
link:www.nameofthewebsite.com work?

METHOD 1
link:www.nameofthewebsite.com. Result was only 58 links

METHOD 2
LINK: "www nameofthewebsite com". Result was 160,000 links

SO, which of the two methods is more accurate.
Please reply ASAP!

Thanks and regards
D

[sugarrae]

>>>SO, which of the two methods [on Google] is more accurate.

Neither - use Yahoo. :-)

[mitchmatch]

Does any one know how to track the backlinks on Google
link:www.nameofthewebsite.com work?

- Yes. It works for me. :d

For Yahoo: Try this format!
linkdomain:yourdomain.com

[martinibuster]

Try this in Yahoo:
linkdomain:example.com -site:example.com

That way you won't be counting links within your own sites.

Also see this thread from last week:
[webmasterworld.com...]

[seonews]

link:www.domainname.com shows a couple of links, though not all of them, that link to your site. But link: www.domainame.com or the way you wrote it all the sites with your url on them. For example linking to you with the anchor text domain will result in my site listed in your link:www search. But just having your url like www.domainame.com floating around my site with not anchor text will get displayed in the link: www search. So the second one really doesn't help towards PR or linkage power as it doesn't have an anchor to describe your site. Overall though I'd suggest you use yahoo site explorer as it is the one that shows ALL of the links pointing to your site.

Thank you

[contentwithcontent]

The link operator in Google "link:" does not show you all the links to your site. The Google help page that discusses the link operator states that it does not (it says that the link operator will show you "a sampling" of the links to your site.)

The reason they do not show all links is generally believed to be due to link chasing and other rank manipulation attempts by webmasters.

The other posters are correct to say that yahoo provides more accurate data using their "linkdomain:" operator.

[wolfadeus]

Google is generally more secretive than yahoo...interestingly enough, I used yahoo inbound links for my SEO, but rank very well on g, badly on y...

So stick with yahoo linkdomain:

[Buscamos]

I just found out a similar discrepancy with the link command in google. There is a world of difference in results between, link:www.DomainName.com, and link: www.DomainName.com (w/ a space after the colon). Why is this? For my site the first one shows 16 links (mostly internal ones), for the second it gives me well over 20,000 links. Is the latter more accurate as to showing all incomming links including paid links & pages showing Adwords & Overture ads?