More Inward links on MSN & Yahoo?
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.alexdigital.com
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 PageRank (PR).
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.
A point I’ve noticed with regards to backlinks is that Google has a seperate index for this and gets updated as infrequently as PageRank which would account for vague results. I also believe Yahoo and Live(Microsoft) use real time queries when checking links which would also provide a more accurate result set.