Google Does not report on All your inbound links

February 14, 2008

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I have received many emails asking me why Googlelady is ranked very well on Google and it has so little backlinks or “useless” backlinks from the results that Google shows. Everytime, I explain that Google does not report all of your Inbound links and that have been said by Googleguy which is a worker in Google that visit sometime the forums and make some comments about Google. One of them is this question. Does google doesn’t report all the inbound links from a site?

This have been said since 2004. But seems that this post is important for those googlelady’s readers:

Alright, I just dropped an email to our webmasters about the features.html page. As I understand it, this has been explained to various degrees by Matt in San Jose SES, Magnus in Stockholm SES, and then Matt again in Las Vegas at the WMW conference, but I’ll try to say it in one nice chunk so that people can have it as a reference.

Google doesn’t return all backlinks in response to a link: command. In the ancient days, it was because there was a finite amount of storage space on the machines that served link: requests. So we only kept the backlinks for the top N pages. Later as we moved to a different indexing system, we kept backlinks for the top M% of pages. This was helpful for important pages, but it meant that Mom and Pop sites with lower PageRank wouldn’t have as good a chance to see their backlinks.

At SES London, DaveN had a suggestion. He said: why don’t you give all pages an equal chance of seeing backlinks? That’s good for users, who will have a greater chance of seeing backlinks for a given page, and it’s especially good for smaller websites–they’d have a chance to see backlinks. It seemed like a good idea, so we implemented it. In fact, in order to give each page a better chance of seeing backlinks (instead of just the top M% of pages), we doubled the amount of backlinks that Google exports to the outside world. So users now have access to twice as much link: data as before; it’s just not all the top PageRank pages.

Q: Ah, you know, I hadn’t noticed that all those “I don’t see any backlinks for my site” threads were getting more and more rare in the last few months. So there are twice as many backlinks available, but from a broader spectrum of pages instead of just higher PageRank pages?
A: Yup.

Q: Isn’t it possible that DaveN had some other motive behind his suggestion? Like he wanted to create a smoke screen so that other people couldn’t see where he got his links from, or that he wanted people to move away from being so obsessed with backlinks?
A: DaveN is the best guy to answer that question. The part that really resonated with me when I heard the suggestion was that people with smaller websites with less PageRank could have a better chance of getting useful results when they used link: on their domain.

Q: Can you see all the backlinks internally at Google?
A: Yup. Given the large amount of data involved, and the fact that remarkably few people use the link: command, we don’t show all backlinks externally, but we can access them internally.

• 1. Google used to report only a sample of inbounds from PR 4 or above. This led to the webmaster misconception that only PR 4 and above are useful, as well as the misconeption that Google only shows “important” backlinks. Ever since then webmasters shun links from any site with less than PR 4. Sadly, webmasters continue making this mistake to this very day. Even though Google has changed how it reports backlinks, webmasters continue to operate under the old mistaken notions, as if nothing has changed.
• 2. What changed? Several years ago, DaveN spoke with Matt Cutts in London several years back and told him of the practices springing up around the PR 4 limitations and said it would be a great idea if they showed a randomized sample of backlinks. Matt agreed and shortly thereafter Google started showing a randomized sample of backlinks.
• 3. Google doesn’t show you all backlinks.
• 4. What backlinks it shows aren’t necessarily counting for the algo.
• 5. What backlinks it doesn’t show doesn’t mean they are not counting, it only means they are not being shown to you.
• 6. Google’s backlink data is not useful for making accurate SEO decisions as they do not represent data about how things are ranked.

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