Greetings, renvhoek!
My apologies for the delay in you receiving an Answer to your
Question. Questions which are posted that contain the magic "G" word
are automatically locked by the computer until the Editors have a
chance to review them, in case they are about something that would be
more appropriately handled by Google themselves rather than by
Researchers.
We gets lots of questions from website owners wanting to know why the
links: search method won't show that any pages link to their website,
even though they KNOW for a fact that such pages exist -- or why the
link: command returns a lot fewer results than the number of pages
that they KNOW link to their site.
Because of Google's secrecy, it is not known for absolute certain, but
the general consensus among experienced webmasters who have
extensively studied Google's "backward links" function is that if a
URL has a Page Rank less than 4, the link: function will not work, and
that if it has a Page Rank of 4 or higher, the link: function will
only return pages with a Rank of 4 or higher:
From Senior Forum Member "Beachboy" at WebmasterWorld:
"Your index page is PR3, Google won't show any inbound links unless
the page you're doing the query on is PR4 or greater."
http://www.webmasterworld.com/forum3/4784.htm?highlight=inbound+links+higher
From Senior Forum Member "Birdman" at WebmasterWorld:
"It is thought that Google only shows backlinks from pages that have a
pr4 or higher."
http://www.webmasterworld.com/forum3/7309.htm?highlight=inbound+links+higher
The 241 results from the link: command are pages with Page Rank of 4
or higher. The other 4,979 results (5220 minus 241) are pages with
Page Rank of 3 or less. If http://www.mtgnews.com had a Page Rank less
than 4, the link: command would return no results at all.
Remember that that 241 number includes pages within the
http://www.mtgnews.com site itself. To more accurately determine the
number of pages linking to that site, you can use the command
link: www.mtgnews.com -site:mtgnews.com
://www.google.com/search?q=link%3A+www.mtgnews.com+-site%3Amtgnews.com+&filter=0&num=100
Right now, that command yields 117 pages (although it says 122).
However, using the same string with the command links: (note the "s"):
links: www.mtgnews.com -site:mtgnews.com
://www.google.com/search?q=links%3A+www.mtgnews.com+-site%3Amtgnews.com+&filter=0&num=100
yields 165 pages (although it says 176).
Why? Nobody knows for sure. I personally believe both of the theories
that it has to do with 1) which of Google's numerous servers your
request happens to hit, and 2) differences in the way they have set up
their algorithm to query the index when the command link: is used
instead of links: .
Just now, when I refreshed
://www.google.com/search?q=link%3A+www.mtgnews.com+-site%3Amtgnews.com+&filter=0&num=100
I got 97 links, and when I refreshed again, I got 107 links.
Because Google has SO many servers all over the world, it takes a
great deal of time for changes in the main index to propagate to all
the copies of the index on the various servers around the world. There
is never really a time when the indices on ALL of Google's servers
EXACTLY match each other; that's why you will get varying results.
So if you're checking your backward links, I recommend that you do it
using both the link: command AND the links: command, to get a more
comprehensive list by combining the two.
In addition, if you're not already aware of it, you can also check
backward links by using AllTheWeb ( http://www.alltheweb.com ).
http://www.alltheweb.com/urlinfo?q=www.mtgnews.com
Because AllTheWeb indexes the web differently than Google, you may get
quite different results using this search.
Before Rating my Answer, if you have any questions about the above
information, please post a Request for Clarification, and I will be
glad to see what I can do for you.
I hope that this Answer provided exactly the information that you
needed!
Regards,
aceresearcher |
