I have a few sites and I often find out that google omits lots of backlinks but with the link:mysite.com function shows my own site to.. Why is that?
It's not that Google does not see your links. They just choose to only show people a sample of those links. Personally I think they do this so as to not expose too much about their algorithm. If you knew exactly which links Google counts that would give you an advantage when link building. In your webmaster tools account I think you can see a larger sample of your links. Yahoo is better for checking number of backlinks as they show you a much larger percentage of your links.
You are right. Even inside webmaster tool we hardly see some 10 percent of all back links there. Google is google becasue of that. It takes a lot care in not revealing how it indexes the website. How it ranks the websites is the big question in all our minds
link:domain operator shows only relevant and quality backlinks. It's no that google indexed only them, but, if you check through Google Webmaster Tools, you'll find the exact number of backlinks indexed by google.
use either webmaster or yahoo site explorer[includes nofollow too] for better details https://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/
No Google does not reveal all the links it "COUNTS" in webmaster tools. The links in GWT are a relative example of the links it has found pointing to your site. Nothing more.... Checking Yahoo shows you the links Yahoo finds of value..... What Yahoo sees.... has no relation to Google and its PageRank Posting things like this is misinformation and confuses others
Correct - Google never reveals all backlinks. Yahoo Site Explorer is about as accurate as you will find. Link Diagnosis uses Site Explorer and is very useful but only gives the top backlinks. It does reveal follow/nofollow however
Google reserves the right to count the number of backlinks for a particular site and so never get bothered about the BL count from google but watch for the traffic from the SE leader, which matters more.
Yahoo site explorer will show all the backlinks linking to your website. However, if you use the SITE:url.com query on Google, you will only see a couple of these URLS which are usually relevant and Google would consider them good sources. Try using the SITE: URL.com query (Space between SITE: and URL.com) You will find lots more backlinks. Not sure where the difference here is thou.
Who told you that??? Just like Google - Yahoo will not show all of the links it "scores" All links pointing to a site are not of value.....
Google does see the links very likely -- it is just that they decided to only display a portion to the publis (they have their reasons, i suppose)
They only show some of the links they see. They would never expose the truth as to do so would allow SEOs like myself to further reverse engineer the algorithm and create ranking havoc. Like any business they are going to protect themselves with whatever security measures are necessary......that is just common business sense.....