I figure I should have hundreds if not over 1,000 links from directory submission, aritcles, press releases, blogs, internal links, recipricals and more. Why do only 68 show up in Google?
What you see via the link: option when searching is limited. Google just shows a "sampling". However, Webmaster Tools should be more complete. Internal links are not seen using link: Personally, I haven't found much of any backlinks from directories (sadly) and blog comments. The best results will come from text links from pages that do not have many other external links. If Google's spider doesn't follow the link, due to say it being a javascript link, then it won't be considered as a link. It is possible those links just haven't been found either. Another factor could be the spider being blocked by settings in htaccess, robots.txt and possibly others. Here's a good post on it - http://geoland.org/2007/11/fake-links-nofollow-is-just-the-beginning.
Yes, Yahoo! always shows lots of backlinks and it shows them very quickly.. you can be sure if Yahoo!'s crawl bots saw them, Google's did too. http://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.co...ndychat.com&bwm=i&bwmf=u&bwms=p&fr2=seo-rd-se
none of the link verification methods give you an exact number, it only approximates, rather your site statistics should be able to show you how many such links are bringing you traffic, that is more important i suppose
Hey promoman, Hard to say without further analysis. If you haven't done so, you really need to get a Google Webmaster Tools account as previously mentioned. Lots of valuable info there (related to your sites). Also keep in mind that directory submissions can take a while to publish. Some directories take days, weeks, or even months before your link is published. That's good though...that way Goolge doesn't freak out when you get hundreds of backlinks all at once. On a side note, I've forwarded your website links to my wife. She is in my son's high school band booster club and is looking for just the kind of stuff you offer to try to raise funds for the band's uniforms. You may have a new customer soon.
Google only shows a small percentage of backlinks they are very secretive and they do not want to show the linking structure for any site. Google may show that you only have 68 links but in reality you have much more links than that.
If you register with google webmaster tools you'll find a section that shows a much larger proportion of backlinks than a link:www.mysite.com search. It's only updated periodically though so you may have to wait a while for links to show up.
thanks for the reference -and I have viewed the google tools - was just curious how google shows some of same for my competitors and not me
Thanks for the link to yahoo's engine. I have been having problems with seeing my links through Google over the last couple of weeks. This will definitely help me gauge my progress in link exchanges
another way to use the yahoo siteexplorer is to use the "linkdomain:" command for example type in yahoo search box: linkdomain:www.example.com
Google search engine doesn't reveal all the backlinks of your site. It display only a random sample of your links. But if you want to see more of your links you can view it on google webmaster tools.