Something has been bugging me for months and I hope someone can kindly offer some advice. my site is: www.ieltsanswers.com google says in the pagerank tool that installs with chrome that it links to NO backlinks but when I use the webmasters tool it seems there are loads of backlinks. My concern is that my pagerank which s stuck on 2 is being influenced by the backlink score of zero. i look at competitors using the chrome pagerank and they have them. any ideas? Is it because I don't have good quality backlinks? or do I need to submit a site index. every couple of weeks I use a site Attracta to get into some directories. free service. I have pictures below to illustrate. Any comments appreciated:
Ive run your domain through my account with Open Site Explorer and posted the results attached for you. Different software will yield different results ie SEOSpyglass, Majestic, Ahrefs and GoogleWTools will show different number of backlinks. As you can see you only have 5 linking root domains so I would advise getting more variety from other sources. You should submit a sitemap to webmaster tools manually its good practice, also check that your backlinks are indexed. Hope this helps you out
Beware of submitting your site to directories with a tool. You do not want to be listed in spammy directories so before submitting your site you should be sure to look at the directory and see if it is relevant to your industry and if it's not then avoid it.
Just to say that there is NO tool that can show you ALL your backlinks. Better check with at least 3-5!
Here's the deal. Webmaster tool shows every single link that goes to your site pretty much, but shows terrible quality links. The best link checker is majestic SEO, if your links aren't showing up in most rank checkers, they aren't high enough quality.
Unfortunately the above statements are not quite accurate. Webmaster shows only a partial backlink profile, its important as "patco" said to use as many backlink checkers as possible no backlink checker finds all backlinks. A conservative estimate would be only 50-60% of all backlinks are found even if indexed. Matt Woodward did an indepth experiment showing Ahrefs v Majestic v SEO Spyglass and Ahrefs came out on top
It is better if you use all popular backlink checkers like Ahrefs, Majestic, Backlinkwatch.com to have an idea of backlinks of your website.
Thanks for all the replies. Its comforting and helps me feel better about humanity in general! Yesterday was a dark day, I imagine we all get them. I feeling that hard effort is in vain! Anyway I guess it may just be that my backlinks are not of high enough quality and I need better ones for them to show up in google pagerank. I was just fearful that the ones I had were not being counted due to some small glitch in my site. one of the reasons I was frustrated is because I am dedicating the next three months to content and I really DON'T want to be burning time on SEO. My goal is to produce 3 EBOOKS to sell on my site (about passing an English test called IELTS), AND THEN, work on SEO in order to attract people and sell the books. My site does seem to already attract a few people and it is growing organically. According to Google analytics I have about 200 visitors a day. If anyone reading this offers SEO service or can recommend someone I may be interested in that, especially if it was small scale. I will not approach any of the big guys through google searches because I don't trust them! Best of luck to you all! Wish you all modest profitability.