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My understanding has always been that the "link" operator showed a small amount of the links pointing to your site. The SE's don't tell you all the back links. And, it seems to fluctuate too. Possibly because they don't want people reverse engineering the links--and finding to much out about their algo.
Am i way off here?
I have a client who wants us to show their sites link popularity month-to-month -- and analyze it for them.
For example, they want us to show the link popularity for Google, MSN, Yahoo etc, and then say whether it has gone up and down for the month -- and why.
Is this pointless? Based on my understanding of it (above) i think it is because the "link:" operator is only a partial -- and often fluctuating -- metric.
What do you think?
Is this pointless? Based on my understanding of it (above) i think it is because the "link:" operator is only a partial -- and often fluctuating -- metric.
I think it's pointless. A client who wants to watch background metrics like this is going to drive you crazy.
Google gives only partial listings. Yahoo Site Explorer gives extremely complete listings, but they're too complete... you'll see every scraper link, every blog link, every tracking link... and sometimes even some PPC links. MSN, as I remember, is somewhere in between Google and Yahoo.
But if your client thinks he's going to be getting a metric of useful links, which is probably what he wants to track, he's mistaken. I generally tell my clients what it is I think they need to know, and if they don't accept that going in, we stop right there.
But I think google only show backlinks which have page rank attibuted.
Anyway, google always have poor options in search operators. The old altavista, back to 90īs was better in this point.
