Can some one tell me what the difference is between link:www..... and link: www..... In other words putting a space after the colon and not putting a space. If I do a link search use my site with a space and without I get two different results. Without the space I get far fewer results.

Google's new Webmaster Central wizard doesn't put a space. Any ideas?

link:domain.com shows pages that link to your site. Be aware that Google only lists some 5% to 10% of all pages that they actually know about.


link: domain.com shows all pages that contain the word "link" and the word "domain.com"; nothing more. They may, or may not, actually link to you.

great thank-you

In terms of using the link command - better to use it on Yahoo or MSN as they have more results (as g1smd pointed out, Google limits the number of results that they show you).

link:domain.com shows pages that link to your site. Be aware that Google only lists some 5% to 10% of all pages that they actually know about.


link: domain.com shows all pages that contain the word "link" and the word "domain.com"; nothing more. They may, or may not, actually link to you.

Why would Google only list 5% to 10% of back links?

An answer that I've heard that makes sense to me is that Google doesn't want people reverse engineering their algorithm and they feel that by limiting the number of backlinks which they show for any given website they can help protect their algorithm.

I'd be interested to hear, though, if anyone else has other explanations of why Google does this.

That makes sense, but could you even reverse engineer their algorithm?

The reason I say that, I thought Google judges back links on a number of factors like:
-Type of link, image vs. text
-relevance of content
-Age of the link

as well as other factors. Even if they did give you every single link, cracking the algo would be pretty difficult, if not impossible.

I imagine that's the position MSN and Yahoo take, but Google has always seemed to be of the opinion that the less anyone knows about how they work, the better.

The irony is, that Google started as "Backrub (http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/13.08/battelle_pr.html)", an attempt to list backlinks. And now they are well known for being the engine that doesn't report them accurately.

Ian

Thanks Ian for that great link, I really enjoyed the article.

While reading the article I thought of a theory as to why Google is so secretive. Most of us do not have PhDs in mathematics, so I imagine that it is hard for us to tell how easy or hard it would actually be to reverse engineer Google's algorithm. It may be, though, that with enough computing power backed up by some really smart mathematicians one would be able to pull valuable information about how it is that Google ranks websites. Remember, search is big money and there are plenty of large organizations out there who would like to get a piece of the Google pie.

This is, of course, just a theory. At the end of the day it may also just be human nature. They want to protect their business, and whenever someone wants to protect something they don't always act the most rational Remember, mathematicians are humans too, with all the emotions that come with that. :)