Question on inbound links

[atlanta404]

Hi.
When I type in link:www.mysite.com into Google, sometimes it returns pages from within mysite. Why is this happening? It only includes a couple of pages, and there are probably a thousand or so pages within my site that link to the homepage. I'm really looking for EXTERNAL sites that have inbound links to my site.

Thanks!

[CarrieHill]

Hi,
Google's link: function isnt the best for finding all of your inlinks. They're basically showing the backlinks (or inlinks) to your homepage that they think are important - maybe :)

If you have a Google sitemap account at Google Webmaster Central you can use that to find inlinks to every page on your site that Google recognizes.

If you dont have a sitemap account at Webmaster Central (get one ;) ) you can use siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com. Here you will see every inbound link to your domain.

Hope this helps.
~Carrie