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>> CUTTS: Sven Heß from Wiesbaden, Germany
asks, "How accurate is Google's backlink check
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(link:...)? Are all nofollow backlinks filtered
out or why does Yahoo/MSN show quite more
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backlink or more results? The short answer
is that, historically, we only had room for
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a very small percentage of backlinks because
web search was the main part and we didn't
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have a ton of servers for link colon queries.
And, so, we have doubled or increased the
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amount of backlinks that we show over time
for link colon, but it is still a sub-sample,
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it's a relatively small percentage. And I
think that that's a pretty good balance because
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if you just automatically show a ton of backlinks
for any website, then spammers or competitors
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can, you know, use that to try to reverse-engineer
someone's ranking. And you don't necessarily
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want some else spying on your rankings and
trying to figure out how they can compete
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with you by getting every single link that
you got. What we do instead is a nice compromise.
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If you registered your site in google.com/webmasters,
our webmaster console, then you can see all,
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or practically all of the banklinks that we
know about you. So, a vast, vast, vast, you
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know, majority of the banklinks that we know
about are there in Google's Webmaster console.
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So, you can look at a sub-sample for any website
or any page on the web, but if you want to
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see pretty much the full dump of what we know
about, you can see it for your own site but
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not necessarily for your competitors. We think
that that's a pretty good compromise, and
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so that's probably the policy that we'll have
going forward. San Diego, Tim from San Diego
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says, "If you have inbound links from reputable
sites but those sites do not show up in a
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link:webname.com search, does that mean you
are not getting any credit in Google's eyes
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for having those inbound links? No, it doesn't.
Link colon only shows a sample, you know,
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a sub-sample of the backlinks that we know
about. And it's a random sample, so it's not
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like we only show the high page rank backlinks--that's
what we used to do--and then anyone who had
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a page rank four or below wasn't able to see
their backlinks because their weren't in the
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high page rank, they weren't getting high
page rank links. So we made it more fair by
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randomizing which backlinks we would show
and we also sort of doubled the number of
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backlinks that we would show at that time.
Now, what's interesting is if you only show
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links that flow rank or that we trust or that
are, you know, don't have a nofollow, then
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people could kind of reverse-engineer that
and say, "Oh, I'll try to get the links that
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are really valuable." So, we show the links
that do, you know, carry a lot of credit in
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our system and we also show the links that
we don't really trust or don't really carry
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a lot of credit in our system. So, it is truly
just a random sample of, you know, stuff that's
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nofollow, stuff that's followed, stuff that
we do believe a lot, stuff that we don't trust
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as much. So, just because you don't see one
particular link and link colon, it doesn't
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mean that it doesn't or does flow--reputation,
page rank, whatever you want to refer to it
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as. If it's your own site, you can use Google's
Webmaster console, sign up, and get a very
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complete, basically, the vast majority of
links that we know about as a dump that you
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can even download it as a CSV file. So, if
you do want to get a really good idea of your
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backlinks, that's the place to go and get
a pretty exhaustive list of your links according
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to Google.
