If I go to google and enter: link:www.hotlib.com link: www.hotlib.com links:www.hotlib.com links: www.hotlib.com If I then put http:// in front, well ... Then I get another results ... again... All return different result, from 1 up to 138,000 ... Why ? What is the correct way to do this to get a result I can trust ? Any idea ?
When you type links (plural) it is actually doing a search for that term since links isn't a recognized command. as far as the difference between putting the www. or the http in front of it, that is different because google is checking to find links to that particular page and sees those pages as different. That command finds the links to the page you specify. If you specify www.hotlibs.com you will get different results than if you specify http://hotlibs.com
adding to what joshbond said.....you should definitely look to redirect your non www pages to the www version
You can't trust the link: operator in Google, period. It often doesn't give you the full picture, only a sample of the backlinks it knows about.
Do u mean I do the redirect on my server ... OR ... if I login to to Webmaster Tools, I do it here (I have no association now) : --- If www.hotlib.com and hotlib.com point to the same site, you can tell us here how you want URLs to display in our index. * Display URLs as www.hotlib.com (for both www.hotlib.com and hotlib.com) o Display URLs as hotlib.com (for both www.hotlib.com and hotlib.com) o Don't set an association. --- ANOTHER THING about the link command ... If I enter link:www.hotlib.com I get 507 backlinks while link: www.hotlib.com give 138.000 Notice the SPACE before www that show much more backlinks... Any idea why and is 507 or 138.000 correct ?
Interesting, I didn't know about that one. I checked my site and it had a LOT more links show up with the space also.