Isn’t Google great? There is a whole industry of hacks like me built up around trying to “beat” Google and get better search engine rankings. It’s clever how if you want to do anything to improve the way Google considers the mountain of data it holds, or the way it receives that data then there are APIs for everything from maps to search algorithms to visualization techniques and so on. But if you want to find a way to cheat the system, take a short-cut to higher rankings, then Google significantly vague. Better still through you will find a mountain of debate, myth and general confession across the so called experts about whatever the subject may be.

In this regard I am talking today about the Google link: operator. I am regularly asked why if you type link:www.domain.com into Google you get a different list and numbers of links than if you look at the same domain in Google Webmaster; and moreover is there any value in the list of links provided by the link :operator, after all it seems to list a bunch of crap pages with ranks even of zero.

In my opinion the facts are:

• In the old days (pre 2002) the link: operator displayed all the links to a site – but this was changed for two reasons: firstly, it provided an opportunity to cheat the system, you could in effect identify a competing site’s links and set out to poach them; secondly, the shear weight of the data Google is holding and the ongoing processing power required to continually answer such queries became a burden for Google.

• The second point above is case in point by the fact that Google does not publicly update it’s page rank tool nor the numbers of links shown in the Webmaster section regularly. Some say it is as infrequently as three monthly - but I see my link numbers growing month on month in Webmaster tools – so it seems just fair to say frequently but not in real time.

• Which means that the number of links and in fact the physical links themselves in your Webmaster tools are unlikely to ever be exactly accurate.

• If you want to “spy” on a competitors links then it appears Yahoo is the best most transparent source. You can be rest assured if Yahoo, MSN or anyone else knows about that links, so does Google. The important point in fact is how much weight Google gives to those links. Recall, Google looks at the content of the page generating the links, the text that makes up the link (the anchor text), the considered importance of the link generating page (it’s Page Rank) and the content of the page receiving the link. Quite simply if your page is about Queensland and the linking page is about Queensland and anchor text says something like “more information about travel in Queensland” then that link is going to be of more value than same reciprocal link buried in a links page linking to your generic home page. Matt Cutts on his blog even makes it more clear than this - he says “do not assume just because you see a back link that it’s carrying any weight”.
  

So is there any value in the list of links generated by the link: operator. After all Google includes it as a tool from Webmasters. Firstly, the list is not as random as some would suggest – evidenced by the fact you get the same result over and over, and because of the point that Google doesn’t want to be bombarded by erroneous queries when its primary purpose is better quality search results matched to pertinent advertising. Unfortunately, I can’t see the value of the link: operator. The list is clearly a subset of all the links to a site but there does not seem to be any rhyme or reason to the list; they don’t seem to be the most recent links, not the highest value links or any other obvious reason, and they certainly are not going to be of any use in a competitor analysis.

So in summary the answer to the continual question is why does the results on the link: operator vary so radically from the links shown in Google Webmasters is to avoid link poaching and to reduce the effort on the Google database.  Secondly, the links shown in Webmasters more accurately reflects the number of links to your site - but in no way indicates the value of those links.  Finally, use Yahoo! or MSN to get an indication of your competitors links.

Tags: links, SEO

This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 9th, 2008 at 2:49 pm and is filed under Opinion. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.