I’ve often wondered when investigating how many inward links our clients have why Google always shows less than MSN & Yahoo. You can check how many links a site has by using a link: command.

e.g. link:www.bbc.co.uk

Yahoo uses a linkdomain: command.

If you run the commands on all 3 search engines you’ll probably find quite a difference in the results. I decided to do a little research to find out what was going on..

If Googles main criteria for a good search result is links isn’t it a little weird that it doesn’t index all your precious inward links?

It turns out that Google purposely doesn’t list all links pointing to a particular page. They do this because they feel by giving webmasters this information they may be able to use it to manipulate search results. This implies that Google still know they’re there and includes them while calculating page rank.

Another discovery is that Google unlike the others only shows the links to a particular page so running a “link:” on your domain will only includes sites point at the homepage. The others show all links to all pages.

So keep an eye on your inward links but don’t be disappointed if they don’t all show up in Google. They’re probably being counted, just not being acknowledged.

This entry was posted on Thursday, August 24th, 2006 at 2:12 pm and is filed under 1upSearch Blog, Search Engine Optimisation (SEO). You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.