How reliable is the Link: command

When doing search engine optimisation part of our job is analysing websites to find strengths and weaknesses. One such strength or weakness to a website can be the links it has going to it.

Google and Yahoo provide you with a tool to find out how many links they have, if you go to yahoo or Google and type ‘Link:www.example.com’ and it will give you a list of links that point to that site. Also if you set up the site in webmaster tools it will also give you a list of links pointing to your site.

The problem is that all the different lists and techniques to find who is linking to you will be different. Google Link command will always return the least amount of links, This is because Google will rate how good the link is but if it decides its not a strong link then it may completely ignore the link. Google however gives a more accurate representation of who is linking to you. Live search currently doesn?t offer this service after they claimed it was abused by automated services.

Having many different results can make it quite confusing, and may concern you if you listen to Google and take them as gospel. The way to use the information is to use it all, use yahoo to see all your links and use Google to see what your strong links are. Remember it can take a few months for a link to be recognised in a search engine, if you are desperate to see up to date links then a tip from me would be to install and look at your Google analytics, using analytics you can see referring websites which will show you the latest links pointing to your site providing somebody has used the link to get to your site.

Gary
NSEO Programer

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