fluke: I suggest you make your own list of backlinks and check them every week or so to make sure they are still up. This Online Free Reciprocal Link Checker works ok for checking whether your backlinks are still up. I suggest also you take a look at Arelis which is a reciprocal link manager and will test your backlinks weekly and email the site they are on if they are not still up. Keep in mind that Google is not providing you with a list of all your backlinks. If you have been crawled by Yahoo! you will find the backlinks they report closer. Do a linkdomain:example.com
Backlinks are up for both of my sites too ..... Nearly double. G's definitely up to something ....... they need to get their BL info perfect before they start a PR update, so hopefully a PR update won't be that far off.
Being crawled by Slurp is no guarantee that you'll find your pages in Yahoo -- not even if Slurp is visiting you regularly. Yahoo seems to be weeks-to-months behind in updating their links. You may be better off just searching for your URL ("www.yoursite.com") or anchor text(s) using Google.
minstrel: Well I consider Google backlinks reported out to lunch. While Yahoo may not be perfect they give you a better idea of what you have for links.
I would agree that the link:url request on Google isn't much use any more -- but my point was that there are other ways to extract the information from Google and that Yahoo often won't "give you a better idea of what you have for links" because the links aren't there in Yahoo's database.
thanks bob - i usually use yahoo to give me a better gauge on my backlinks - it is quite out of date - but last time i checked it had around 3 times as many as google. i am aware that Google link command is totally screwed - but still there is something re-assuring about Google showing most of your BL's. i was trying to get williamc's perl reciprocal link checker working last night and ending up tearing my hair out - (i havn't used a perl script before - and my cgi-bin folder has dissappeared) - i have a look at the one u suggest i have one that i wrote myself in vb- its a bit cr*ppy and it needs a list of specific pages to go through.(i also written a cr*ppy links "manager" - which while is nothing like arelis i find useful as i could personalize it to the nth degree.- it saves me alot of time) thanks i'll check out the link checker u suggest.
dammit - i was hoping when it said spider - it could crawl URLs checking each page for links - the thing is i don't have a list of all my recip link pages - (i have about 60%) of them. The thing is now i think about it alot of the sites i'm exchaning links with a big vacaton rental directories - which would probabll take a program that spiders all pages ages to do . thanks anyway bob- looks like i'll have to find them out manually ..