Backward Links

[multilingual]

I recently posted a reply on another thread, about a company offering to boost the links on websites, and it got me thinking.

When I click on the toolbar to get the backward links for my site, it shows a figure of 71, but if I do a search for my site's exact domain name in full on Google I get a figure of 652. When I click on any of those 652 I am brought to a web page and on that page is a link to my site. Take away the 155 internal pages on the site itself and that leaves about 500 external links to my home page.

So why does the toolbar only show 71?

I was told once that Google only recognises pages with high page ranks of 5 or more, but I can see plenty of PR3 sites in those 71.

Anyone shed any light on this?

JB

 

[DuaneJackson]

You are searching for pages that have "www.yourdomain.com" in them. These don't necesarrily link directly to you, it could be via an aliasing script or not a link at all.

try entering the following as your search term:

link:domain.com

and see what you get. Bear in mind that Google won't always show you all the info it has init's db about who is linking to you - either in the search results or whatever tool you are using to check your backlinks.

 

[multilingual]

Thanks for the reply,

using link:mydomain.com is the same as clicking on the Google toolbar for backward links.

If I enter the search phrase "http://www.mydomain.com" (including the quotation marks) into a search engine it has to bring pages containing that exact script, in my case the number of results is 766.

That does not mean that they are all linking to my site actively, true, but by definition the script is a link, even if it's not live for some reason.

I estimate that about 15% of them are not active links, but even if 50% of them are not active (which is unlikely), then that will still mean that there are over 350 links to my site, far more than the Google backlinks figure of 71.

Still no wiser as to how Google arrives at this figure.

JB

 

[Dread]

Not sure on this but possibly it counts it per site? So if you have 5 links on one site google only counts it as one backlink?

just a guess.

 

[Top Hat]

Google will only display backward link of a certain PR vaule PR3/4 and above, so you have 70 + very good quality links.

If you search the url you get 700 because google displays all the pages in its index with that on, even those with a low PR. Those 700 links are all adding to your PR but not as much.

 

[epiphany]

Plus I have heard it said by people in the know (although there is no way to prove this) that the Google link counting system deliberately displays incorrect results to stop people abusing the system by being able to figure out how it works.