I posted this on a different forum and I'm not sure I've gotten a good answer. Hope someone can explain this one to me.

How can counts be so far off when a search is done using LINK search versus what I think is a similar search in advance search?

Here is the situation. If a simple link:www.mysite.com is run on Google it returns a little more than 500 links, same for link:mysite.com. Yet if I run an advance search using mysite's doman as a phrase and limit search to top-level domains I get much larger numbers. Here are examples of search strings:

"www.mysite.com" site:.com = nearly 3000 results
"mysite.com" site:.com = nearly 4000 results
"www.mysite.com" site:.edu = over 250 results
"mysite.com" site:.edu = nearly 500 results

Also get a lot of results by limiting to .org. So what exactly is up with this? I'm sure there is a good explanation for this disparity. When it comes to determining link popularity I was always under the impression that the LINK search was the way to figure out backlink totals. But clearly there are many more links than this.

How can counts be so far off when a search is done using LINK search versus what I think is a similar search in advance search?

sometimes your url will appear on many pages that do not actually provide static links into your site.

Also get a lot of results by limiting to .org. So what exactly is up with this? I'm sure there is a good explanation for this disparity.

limiting the tld does just that. likely you have lots of links or mentions from pages with .org as the tld


When it comes to determining link popularity I was always under the impression that the LINK search was the way to figure out backlink totals. But clearly there are many more links than this.

Google tends to only usually show some of the links from pages with a PR of 4 or greater (they also sometimes show a few links from lower PR pages). Google still factors in many of the links that do not show up when you do a link: check.

Yahoo!'s link checking tool usually shows more links including those from pages google does not consider that important. linkdomain:www.mywhateversite.com @ Yahoo!'s search page.

Thanks - I did not know about the PR4 limit. Also regarding the comment about .org, I should have started a new paragraph. I wasn't intending to ask what's up with .org but what was up with the entire LINK search set up.

Also for comparision sake, in Yahoo LINK:http://www.mysite.com returns over 5,000 while LINKDOMAIN: www.mysite.com returns over 7,000. So clearly most of what is out there are links for my site.

Thanks - I did not know about the PR4 limit.

Just don't get concerned about linking to only PR4 pages and above. Google factors all links, just doesn't show them to you like the other engines. All relevant links are good regardless of page PR value.