Two questions about the link: operator

Sven Heb from Wiesbaden, Germany asks “how accurate is Google’s back link check (link:..)? Are all nofollow back links filtered out or why does Yahoo/MSN show quite more back link results?”

The short answer is that, shortly we only have room for a small percentage of back links because web search was the main part and we didn’t have a ton of servers for link: queries and so we have doubled or increased the amount of back links that we show over time for link: but it’s still a sub-sample, its relatively small percentage. I think that’s a pretty good balance, because if you just automatically show a ton of back links for any website, then spammers and competitors can use that to try to reverse engineer someone’s ranking. And you don’t necessarily want someone spying on your rankings and try to figure out how they can compete with you by getting every single link that you’ve got. What we do instead is a nice compromise; if you register your site in google.com/webmasters or Webmaster council then you can see all of the back links that we know about you. So a vast vast vast the majority of the back links that we know about are there in Google’s Webmaster council. So you can look at the sub sample for any website or any page on the web, but if you want to see pretty much the full dump of what we know about you can see it for your own site but not necessarily for your competitors. We think that that’s a pretty good compromise and that’s probably the policy that we’ll have going forward.

San Diego Tim from San Diego says “If you have inbound links from reputable sites but those sites do not show up in a link:webname.com search, does this mean you are not getting any ‘credit’ n Google’s eyes for having inbound links?

No, it doesn’t. link: only show a sample, a sub sample of the back links that we know about and it’s a random sample and it’s not like we only show the high page rank back links that’s what we used to do and anyone who had a page rank of four or below wasn’t able to see their back links because they weren’t in the high page ranks they weren’t getting high page rank links. So we made it more fair by randomizing which back links we would show and we also doubled the back links we would show at that time. Now what’s interesting if you only show links that flow page ranks or that we trust or that do not have nofollow then people could kind of reverse engineer that and say, oh I’ll try to get the links that are really valuable. So we show the links that carry a lot credit in our system and we also show the links that we don’t really trust or don’t carry a lot of credits in our system. So it is truly a random sample, stuff that’s nofollow, stuff that is followed, stuff that we believe a lot, stuff that we don’t trust that much. Just because you don’t see one particular link in link: it doesn’t mean it doesn’t or does flow reputation or page rank or whatever you want to refer to it as. If it’s your own site you can use Google’s Webmaster council sign up and get a very complete basically the vast majority of links that we know about as a dump that you even download as a CSV file. So if you do want to get a really good idea of your back links that’s the place to get a pretty exhaustive list of your links according to Google.

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