Link Results and Links – Why doesn’t link: Work on Google?
September 23, 2008 · By Bill Austin
This is an article I wrote a while ago as an e-mail but never posted until now. I have added to it and updated portions where appropriate.
Link Results and Links – Why doesn’t link: Work on Google?
Search engines provide a variety of operators that can help you gain additional information about web sites and web pages if you know how to use them. The Link: operator or the link: command used to be one of these useful tools. In recent years, this value has been removed in a variety of ways.
For several years, the Google link: command has been showing only a random sample of the actual links that Google knows about. Many people consider that to be broken and simply respond to inquiries with “The Google Link Command is Broken.”
MSN stopped having the link: command available a while back.
Yahoo’s link: command gives a more “REAL” result but Google’s gives you a better idea of how much trust and authority Google believes the linking sites have in relation to the queried site.
More about Trust and Authority
Some of the reasons a site might have wildly different link: results on Google versus Yahoo are easy to explain with a few words but harder to explain in detail.
Suffice it to say that some of those words include:
Subdomain spam
Affiliate spam
“required linkback” spam
JPOR spam [just plain old regular spam]
All of those are reasons that a link might not be considered trustworthy and authoritative enough to show up in the link: directive search results.
Somewhere on every blogspot.com blog there is a link back to blogger.com or blogspot.com
Somewhere on every Wordpress blog there is a link back to wordpress.org and possibly to wordpress.com
Amazon’s associate program encourages lot of links from affiliate sites to various places on the amazon.com site and out of the 47 million+ pages that link to Amazon.com, Google has decide that it will show a few million of them.
Out of 117,898,248 links to Wordpress.org that Yahoo knows about, Google has decided to show only 299,000 of them.
On the other hand, Yahoo shows only 250,000 links to blogspot.com but shows 8 million+ for blogger.com
The above examples are all examples of link spam. Google is guilty, Wordpress is guilty, Amazon is guilty.
Clearly you have to take anything that Google tells you with a grain of salt but in this case, they do appear to be trying to protect their users in their own “Big Brother – ly” way. Us the results on the Google link: operator only as a relative comparison between different sites. Those numbers have no meaning other than that. Consider the Yahoo link: results to possible be filled with links from low value pages and possibly full of spam as well. Take what you get either way as informational only and not authoritative. Check them periodically to see if they change and to track relative changes but don’t count on them to be trustworthy, authoritative or reliable.
For this site, Google says that the site has 301 links back to the site while Yahoo says that it has over 26,000 links back to the site. Google simply does not believe that the other 26,000 links are important.
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