I've got a problem with referring links to my site. Confusingly, when I search link:the-name-of-my-site.co.uk, only 5 pages are mentioned, yet under my google tools, in the "What Googlebot sees" there are at least 18 different site link terms. And under this part of my google dashboard - Links > Pages with external links there are 101 links in total logged that point to my site. Does anyone have any input as to why these aren't searchable by "link:the-name-of-my-site" on google? Would their absence potentially mean my ranking is lower than it should be? Even more strangely, when I use this tool the link popularity tool from the SEO Positive site, I don't get any links for google at all (not even my own site appears), despite getting results for altavista and yahoo etc, anyone have any ideas on this?
As kiduka said... The LINK: operator only shows a small sample of your URL's inbound links. The Dashboard -> Links -> Pages with external links page in Google's Webmaster Tools ALSO only shows a sample of the URL's inbound links, although it usually displays a more complete sample than those shown by the Google LINK: operator. Neither is typically an exhaustive list of your URL's inbound links unless you only have a few. And it should be noted that BOTH the link operator and the WMT external links can contain NOFOLLOW links, links from URLs that are currently under penalty and provide your URL with no PR/ranking benefit, etc. In otherwords, they can both show links that Google doesn't count. Using the LINK: operator at Yahoo! will show you an exhaustive list of links that Yahoo! knows about (again containing NOFOLLOW links, etc.), but these links may not be the exact same set of inbound links that Google knows about. All-in-all I like using the Yahoo! LINK: operator combined with the Google WMT Pages with external links page to get the best picture of a site's backlink profile.
Google updates backlinks every month. Thus, just wait to next month and search again. You will see some differences.