Why does google show less links?

[ciwee]

Hi all,

Why when you use link popularity tools like http://www.submitexpress.com/linkpop/, google always shows less backlinks to your page then other SEs? Doenst it have the higher number of indexed pages? so why does it happen?

[Marketing Guy]

Links shown using the link: command on Google only show a selection of links - it's just the way they've always done it.

The reason (I would speculate) is that their algo was / is so link focused, they didn't want people just copying the backlinks of competing sites.

MG

[ciwee]

Originally Posted by Marketing Guy

they didn't want people just copying the backlinks of competing sites.

MG

What do you mean?

[Marketing Guy]

Well, if Google ranks my site above someone else's based on the links I have, then the other guy could just go and copy the links I have - what would Google have left to judge the differences between our sites?

That's a very simplified example - the basic concept is that if every has the same inbound links, then Google has a hard time using links as a factor for ranking. So to try and go some way to prevent this they don't show all backlinks for sites.

MG

[Marketing Guy]

OK a better example. What if Miss World judges only selected winners who were beautiful blondes with big tits? What if every contestant was a beautiful blonde with big tits - how would the judges pick a winner?

[ciwee]

I undestood the blondies example .. What I didn't get yet is how can I simply copy your links.. imagine that I find out you have a link from an article at adobe.com. OK, how can I go there and put a link to me there too? it's impossible.

[Marketing Guy]

Well those are the cases where the blondes are natural and not..."enhanced"! So you can't copy directly, but you could try and probably achieve a 95% or so effectiveness.

[ciwee]

you cant fake backlinks

[Tyler Banfield]

http://seoblackhat.com/2006/09/24/ch...klinks-spammy/

[ciwee]

Of course Mohammed makes sense... but according to Adam Lasnik's quote at Tylers blog, it seems that google is not so interested on what links are showing or not. Can we trust it? We'd better use Yahoo for link lists...

[Manish Pandey]

Originally Posted by Marketing Guy

Well, if Google ranks my site above someone else's based on the links I have, then the other guy could just go and copy the links I have - what would Google have left to judge the differences between our sites?

That's a very simplified example - the basic concept is that if every has the same inbound links, then Google has a hard time using links as a factor for ranking. So to try and go some way to prevent this they don't show all backlinks for sites.

MG

Well MG... if the links could be found from yahoo search or even msn search that means that the links are present there in the world wide web... isnt it... and you could always find the sites that has linked to it...

The reason is which i read somewhere that google is only interested in good quality links... what maybe PR3 and above... not sure though cant locate the article...

[Marketing Guy]

Manish, sorry but you read wrong. Yes, back in 2002-2003 or so it was though that Google only displayed PR3+ links in a backlink check, but it has long since been the case that Google only show random selections of backlinks and it doesn't have anything to do with the quality of the links.

It's irrelevant what you *could* do to find links. Yes, most savvy SEOs will use MSN and Yahoo to track backlinks. But the reality of the web just now (and for the past few years) is that the average Joe is obsessed about Google and won't look much further than that.

I think you are confusing "what Google looks for to rank a site well" with "what Google displays in link: requests".

[vistadivine.com]

Ya I agree to the marketing guy Google doesn't shows you all the BLs you have but it only shows you the BLs it thinks are important. However its a very debetal thing that whether those not shown links are taken into account while giving rankings or not.

Akash