Google and Back Links

Useful info from Duncan Carver
"Hey Duncan, Why does Google not show any back links while yahoo and others do? Secondly, I have news releases, YouTube videos and quality articles with reputable ezine distributors and Google has not picked up any of those links either? The site is relatively new and it got hacked last month and was off line for about a week so there might be done issues there. Cheers," ~ Keith Rispin

Hi Keith,

Google only ever shows a "random sample" of incoming links to individual websites.

They did used to show all links but back in about 2004/05 they stopped doing this because it was too transparent to webmasters vying for the same rankings.

Anyone could see exactly what they would need to replicate in their own link building campaigns, in order to achieve similar search engine rankings as the existing top ranked website/s for the respective keyword terms they were targeting.

All other factors remaining equal (a similarly well "on-site" optimized website) a competitor could simply get the exact same linking structure completed and stand a very good chance of ranking in the same (or very close) position of the website whose link campaign they were "reverse engineering".

Obviously this was not in the interest of Google as it allows webmasters to manipulate their search engine results - so they stopped doing this and went the "random sample" way.

So now if you use the... link:yourdomainhere.com ...search command in Google you're only ever going to see a very random sample.

If you're not seeing any links showing in the results, it doesn't mean Google doesn't know about them (and isn't taking them into account when determining where your website ultimately ranks in the index), it just means it's not showing them to you.

As to how they determine this "random sample" I'm not 100% sure.

Generally they tend to show slightly more of the links from "authority websites" (but not all), mixed in with other random links you've managed to secure.

What I do know is if you know you have several thousand unique incoming links to a website, Google is only going to show a few hundred of those.

Another way to get a better idea as to what Google knows about is to use the search command of your own domain name (without the www. prefix). This will not show backlinks as such, but every reference to your website. For example; someone might have
written your domain name on their page but it might not actually be a hyperlink.

In doing this now on a website I operate (that I know as fact has more than 5,000 unique incoming links pointing to it - the majority from unique 3rd party websites), when using the link:search command, Google is telling me there are "about 213"
incoming links.

When I simply search on the domain name itself (without the www.prefix) it shows there are "about 143,000" individual references to that domain within Google's index. Again not all of those are going to be links - but it gives you a better idea as to how
deeply referenced your website actually is within Google.

Obviously you cannot use either of those search commands to get benchmark statistics of competitor's websites anymore - it's become hard to reverse engineer other link building campaigns simply using Google's standard search capabilities. It used to be
nice to be able to see that a website holding a top ranking for a specific term had 1,000 incoming links pointing to it because it gave you an estimate to work towards.

MSN.com (the new bing.com) stopped showing backlinks altogether (not even showing a random sample) back in 2007. Their public reasoning was that there was no need to use extra resources to deliver the results of such search queries because it was not the
"general internet population" searching on them. Of course "privately" this was due to the same reason Google stopped showing all incoming link results as well (webmasters doing competitive SEO analysis).

Yahoo.com has always been more accurate in doing this and generally showed all incoming links making it the best benchmark for comparisons. However just a few weeks ago they announced they would be using the new Bing.com (old MSN) search results in a
partnership deal. Only time will tell if this means they will no longer show backlinks and simply serve up an exact replica of bing.com results and functionality.

So all in all, if you're not seeing any backlinks in Google, but you know you have incoming links pointing to your website, don't worry too much about it. Just get out there and focus on building more incoming links to improve search engine rankings.

As to your website being offline for a week - that's never a good thing but wouldn't be the likely cause - and your incoming links from other sources not showing, well that's explained above.

Chances are you just don't have enough volume at present.
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Duncan Carver - admin@onlinemarketingtoday.com