In an ideal world, you would just have one website (presuming its just an internet presence for one business), and you would just promote that. But, in reality, because it is so easy to have many websites, then this is what happens. Website operators make numerous websites all along the same theme, in order to be more competetive. Now, put yourself in Google's position - it has to index all these very similar websites (what a drag, seeing webmasters blatantly making several sites on the same subject), it decided to make it more difficult for these sites so as to put webmasters off from doing this. Its just another way of trying to cheat the search engines, and Google has clamped down.
I agree again, the unfortunate thing is that my sites have a legitimate reason for existing (www.justgoodcars.com) unlike many other multi domain servers. Oh well!
OR..... this just means that not all your links are showing up because Google doesn't always show all links to a site? Just a question. Some of the Google conspiracies in this thread are getting a bit ridiculous
Good point GeorgeB, however I have checked in MSN and the same situation is going on, However yahoo still shows the back links but they don't seem to have the weight they used too. To be honest I think many people have made some good points. In our society we are always held back by the small minority that want to make a scam, this is apparent in every aspect of life. The problem is we spend so much time working around these problems and very little on the main focus. For example every darn contact page needs a authentication code because people are spamming the hell out of the send mail programs. So we have to spend time fixing these situations and we end up going to ridiculas lengths to get back to where we started before moving forward. This is exactly what is happening with the internet, but hey such is life, but getting back to my point, google therefor needs to continually get more and more complicated to weed out the spammers. there is only one person to blame though and that is google itself, Why you may ask? well thats because google adsense has created the need for thousands of spam sites to exist on the sole purpose of providing ads to customers and no content. Google created the need to have massive amounts of back links to sites in order to show popularity, so guess what about half a billion directory sites suddenly appeared! Why do these sites never disappear? well thats simple if ordinary businesses selling products got to the top ranks in google then there would be no need for adsense/adwords therefor much less money for google. Fair play to them I would probably do the same but it kinda screwed the whole internet! Sorry for the ramblings just got into one there LOL