The following Google serches for backlinks all return different results. Which one (or any other) would Google use to find backlinks to our website in order to calculate one's website pagerank? link:siteretriever(dot)com - Returns: 0,1,4 (the result varies) link: siteretriever(dot)com - Returns 677.000 link:www(dot)siteretriever(dot)com - Returns: 0,1 (the result varies) link: www(dot)siteretriever(dot)com - Returns: 2.850 link:http(double dot)//www(dot)siteretriever(dot)com - Returns: 0,1,4 (the result varies) link: http(double dot)//www(dot)siteretriever(dot)com - Returns: 1.480 href="http(double dot)//www(dot)siteretriever(dot)com" - Returns: 229 "http(double dot)//www(dot)siteretriever(dot)com" - Returns: 772 http(double dot)//www(dot)siteretriever(dot)com - Returns: 731 The online free services for counting backlinks also return different results and some of them are not even close to some of the above... Any idea?
You have asked a really good question. Here is the answer. The exact method to check indexed backlinks is site:urlofwebsite but here is the tricky thing. As you have noticed that by adding www and without www. Google is telling you different results and numbers. Why ? because google considers a url with www different then a url without www. In short google is considering them two different websites. Like so many people are confused about why their backlinks are just disappearing from the index of google. Google has played game with this, now the backlinks that you have made with the url that contains www will not be considered as backlinks for the webiste which is indexed in google without www. And same, if the backlinks were build for the url without www will not be considered for the website which are showing in google search results without www. How to fix that ? You need to change the URL of your website from google webmater tools or you need you use 301 redirect in .htaccess file. I just recently discovered that.