I'm checking my backlinks on Google, Yahoo and Msn every day: http://www.google.com/search?q=link%3Ahttp%3A//directory.zappster.com/ http://search.yahoo.com/search?p=link%3Ahttp%3A%2F%2Fdirectory.zappster.com%2F&prssweb=Search&ei=UTF-8&fl=0&x=wrt http://search.msn.com/results.aspx?q=link%3Ahttp%3A%2F%2Fdirectory.zappster.com%2F&FORM=QBRE On Yahoo and Msn everything is ok, the number of backlinks is ok, increasing almost every day. On Google, I have only 8 backlinks, which is unchanged for about 2-3 months. The same is with the PR. What am I doing wrong ? Thanks.
I have a feeling (others can correct me if I'm wrong) that google only shows you the backlinks that are at/above PR4 and/or have relevant anchor text.
Google only show in their words 'a selection of backlinks' In other words, the google link:domain command is worthless.
I go to an online link popularity site to check for backlinks. I have seen sites that get thousands of links from MSN, Altavista, Yahoo etc. but ZERO from google. Maybe Deano is right about the PR thing.
I was there in person, when Matt Cutts of Google said (repeated ) Google shows a selection of backlinks. he said they show a selection of the ones they know about, no PR value, no rhyme nor reason, just ' a selection of known links'. It s commonly accepted that Google disabled the client facing facility to make link mongering more difficult.
Not sure if this will be helpful...google does monthly blink updates as opposed to daily / weekly which is why google is pretty constant and the others fluctuate. Here's a link with a schedule: http://www.seocompany.ca/pagerank/page-rank-update-list.html
Google update backlinks on an irregular basis rather than monthly. The talk by Google was that eventually they hope to run onto a quarterly forard facing update.