Google Link Search Operator

Posted on: 01-27-2006 Posted in: SEO Techniques Questions

Hi Cricket!

I have another question for you!! This is regarding link exchanges and google. When I type in link:www.craftedcustomgifts.com google only sees 7 pages that link to me. However when I use a link popularity checker I see many more people who have linked to me.

Why doesn’t google recognize these links and what can I do to fix this?? I have been working hard to get relevant links in place on my links page and I am trying to generate relevant reciprocal links, I just don’t understand this discrepancy.

Talina Norris, Flagstaff, AZ
Custom Gifts by Talina

Hi Talina!

Unfortunately using the Google Link Search Operator you described, is not an effective means of finding all of the links to your site. At this time, Google only displays a sample of the sites linking to yours using this method. This does not mean that they are not considering all links to a site when determining placement in the search results. They are simply not displaying all of the links.

The results you were finding using a link popularity checker may be effective for some search engines, but will not display more links indexed in Google than you already receive using the special link operator.

Although it requires sorting your own page links from the results, I can get a closer count for this query by searching for the URL to my site, enclosed in quotations. “www.gnc-web-creations.com”

With my time being extremely limited, I personally spend virtually no time checking how many incoming links I have. I would much rather invest that same time into creating more quality content that will encourage more people to link to my sites and articles naturally.

I WILL DEFINITELY SEE YOU AT THE TOP!

J. Cricket Walker