I noticed this when playing around with the google toolbar and its got me curious. :confused:

If I perform a backward links check on link:http://www.testdomain.com I get very few results but if I remove the "http://" section I get more results returned. The later seems to represent a true reflection of the actual backward links.

Does this mean that when performin link building I should be looking for links that point to the full url of my site i.e http://www.testdomain.com or does it not really matter? It seems google favours the full url hence this feature from their toolbar.

Google doesn't give accurate backlink information, it only gives an 'impression' of the links to a site. It's generally better to use the site: command in Yahoo or MSN for accurate backlink info.

I'd recommend Yahoo Site Explorer instead of Yahoo Search. Site Explorer is intended to give you site and backlink information (they call them "inlinks") and to take this load off of Yahoo's main search page. It's a nice tool. If anything, it errs on the side of reporting too many links; it references just about everything....

http://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/

Thanks guys. what about google? link: or site: command?