Why Are My Backlinks Not Showing Up?
Posted by peter on December 3, 2008 | No Comments
Continuing our series of SEO questions, this one concentrates on the age old question of ‘why are my backlinks not showing up in Google?’
The webmaster forums like digitalpoint are awash with new webmasters who, between posting about why their pagerank hasn’t updated, are asking why Google doesn’t show all their backlinks.
For those of you who are not aware, if you go to Google (or most major search engines) and type:
link:www.domain.com
It will tell you how many backlinks you have to your site. Backlinks, of course, are the major factor in ranking websites. The maths (I’m from the UK) is simple: The greater the number of backlinks, the higher your search engine rankings.
OK, so there’s a tiny bit more to it than that, but all said and done, this is it.
Now, the problem arises when you go to see if all your hardwork has paid off, you know you’ve been approved in thousands of directories, so you are expecting to see a nice healthy number here.
You check and Google says that it found 4 back links. What happened to the other 996?!
The reason for this is that Google, for reasons known only to itself, only shows a portion of indexed links it has for your site. So what ever Google says, you can be safe in the knowledge that the actual number is a lot higher, and they are just choosing not to show you.
Sidenote: there are a number of conspiracy theories out there about why this is. The most popular is that Google wants to protect it’s indexing algorithm.
So now it begs the question, where can you go to accurately find the number of backlinks to your site? In days gone by, it used to be MSN/Live, but they have a pants search engine now, so the place to go is Yahoo Site Explorer.
This search engine will give you a treasure trove of information. All those crappy indexes, all those shady link exchanges will show up here.