Google broken or User confused?

[Wail]

Hiya,

link:www.example.org - on Google returns 922 results.

Okay, lets count only the external backlinks by excluding the example.org url.

link:www.example.org -inurl:example.org - now we only have 6 results.
link:www.example.org -site:example.org - still only 6 results.

Example.org is actually a good example to use. You can see clearly that the 6 pages actually have the phrase "link:www.example.org" in their copy.

The thing is, I'm sure you used to be able to check backlinks in this way. I'm sure you could search with two Google commands before.

link:www.example.org site:example.org - no results.

Is this a new twist? Or have I been confused? (Either is likely! :D )

[BrianR]

Not sure if this answers your question but...

As I understand it, G's link: command does not report all the backlinks for any particular domain.

BrianR

[qwerty]

I think that (perhaps ironically) example.org is not a good example, since the domain is reserved for documentation purposes only. In fact, if you do a straight backlink check (http://www.google.com/search?num=50&hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&safe=off&c2coff=1&q=link%3Awww.example.org) for the domain and take a look at some of the results, you'll see that they're not actually linking to it at all. For example, it lists a bunch of pages on Norelco's site with code like function inviteSurveyPopUp(){
var exturl = "http://www.example.com/";
var alreadySeem = readCookie(SURVEY_INVITE_COOKIE_ID);
if(alreadySeem == ""){
writeCookie(SURVEY_INVITE_COOKIE_ID, "true", 24*365);
var win = window.open(exturl,"PopupInvite","toolbar=0,location=0,status=0,menubar=0,scrollbars =no,resizable=no,width=400,height=450");
win.focus();
Not really a link, and even if it were, it's pointing to example.com.

[Dodger]

Yep qwerty, they are all hosted on the IANA servers too (.com, .org, .net).

The .US is owned by Neustar (no website) and the .BIZ is owned by Neulevel. Both seem to be the same company.

For what it is worth ... the .INFO appears to be available

[Wail]

Ah, yes, example.com is an interesting one. I picked it because it's forum safe.

link:www.searchenginewatch.com (http://www.google.com/search?q=link%3Awww.searchenginewatch.com) has 14,00 backlinks.

link:www.searchenginewatch.com -site:www.searchenginewatch.com (http://www.google.com/search?q=link%3Awww.searchenginewatch.com+-site%3Awww.searchenginewatch.com) has 8 backlinks.

Search Engine Watch works well too. It shows that these 8 sites also explicitly mention the words "link" and "www.searchenginewatch.com".

Google is only letting you use one advanced search command in your query.
I'm pretty sure this is fairly new.

How new is this? That's the question.

[qwerty]

The link: search can't be combined with others -- even simple kw searches. I think that's the only reason you're seeing these results.

[Wail]

Yes, I know. :)

The thing is, I'm sure you used to be able to check backlinks in this way. I'm sure you could search with two Google commands before.

Is this a new twist? Or have I been confused?

[qwerty]

I can't tell you whether or not it's always been this way, but if you look at the Advanced Search Operators (http://www.google.com/help/operators.html) page you'll see that queries like link: and cache: are referred to as "operators" and others like site: and intitle: are called "modifiers". You can use mulitple modifiers, but only one operator, and you can't put modifiers onto operators.

As far as I can tell (by running document.lastModified) that page was last edited on 22 March of this year.