Hi Guys New here, so first hello. I am still in my learning phases of all this, so please forgive me if this is a stupid question but i read everywhere and can not figure it out. Here is the question I own a web design firm. On every website we build is a link on the bottom of the Page wrapped in some nice keywords and a link to my companies website. We have done so far approx 70. Some of these website we built have a nice page rank, of 5 some only 2 or 3 for all it matters. Most of them are listed in google. Some better than others. When i check the backlinks for my own website on Google, or if i do a backlink check for my site only 5 or 6 out of these 70 show up in googles list of backlinks. So instead of 70 backlinks i have 5. Some of the sites we build are on the same server as my site, while others are not. There is no real pattern. I hope someone can help me out here. btw the link on the bottom of all pages always goes like Web Design FL Company Name The whole thing is the link.
The Google link: operator shows the number of high quality links that point to the URL in question. The pages shown in the results are not likely to be the sources of those high quality links. For a more comprehensive list of the links that Google knows about, sign up for the Google Webmaster Tools at http://www.google.com/webmasters/
Thanks for answering So only links from high quality sites qualify as backlinks? Some of the pages as i said have a PR of 5 and they don't show up as backlinks.
It's to show your backlinks in google. It only show the quality backlinks. Unlike yahoo that it shows all your backlinks.
First, if you just recently check your backlinks and not able to see those expected number of links, I must say that there is also an update for inbound links on different SERPs especially in Google. Then, also, in Google, quality links are only listed. You might want to check all your backlinks in Yahoo for it shows the most backlinks you have in your site.
As I say, the link: operator shows the *number* of high quality links and the pages shown in the results are not likely to be the sources of those links. This was changed a couple of years ago to prevent webmasters from poaching high quality links from other websites.
As others have noted, Google only shows a sampling of backlinks. If you want more reliable results, go to Yahoo. http://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/
Yahoo shows most our clients (70) total of 1300 backlinks, Google shows 5 I have to say, i am not getting it. Sorry for being dense.
Open a Google Webmaster Tools account and check the number of links detected there. Google probably knows about your 1300 backlinks, but they only display it in GWT if you verify that it's your website. As rainborick said, they don't show the full list of your backlinks publicly to protect you from competitors who'd like to find out where your best links come from and get links there too.
As already was said link command only display a small sample of quality backlinks. You can have a larger sample by looking in the Google Webmaster Tools, but keep in mind that this is also a sample set.
Google takes about 1-2 months to update my backlinks in the webmaster tools, yahoo siteexplorer takes about 2-3 days.
For the purposes of the Google link: operator, it's always been PageRank that mattered since they switched to showing only the higher quality links around 2003. Traditionally, its taken a link from a page with a PageRank score of 4, or at least a very strong 3, to count for the link: operator. Since the PageRank scale has been recalibrated several times since then, I wouldn't have been surprised if they'd lowered that threshold, but they don't seem to have done so. But this is why you don't see the total number of links shown by this commnd to come close to the numbers you see in Yahoo!. Google isn't crawling as deeply as it used to so many pages from directories and blogs simply never get scanned by them for links. And many of those that do get scanned have very low PageRank scores so they don't count as higher quality in terms of the link: operator results even if they do have some positive effects on rankings (which is an entirely separate issue).
You can check your back-links with Yahoo site explorer, or go with a new account for Google and use the Google Webmasters Tools to check the backlinks count for your website, Google is updating their list almost once a month so you have to wait for a while.
The common answer for that inquiry is... Google's backlink update is slower than any other search engines.