google link popularity question

[christopher]

Hi all,

I've been working on my site's link popularity in an effort to improve it's google placement.

I know I have about 300 links pointing to my site using specific phrases containing my keywords. These fall across about 100 websites, and the pages they are listed in google. I have a unique phrase so I know all of these links to my site have been seen by google.

These links have all been done over the course of the last two months. My site has moved up in the search listings.

However, when I look up my site's backlinks, google says I only have about 20.

Is the discrepency caused by google updating some things faster than others?

Has my site moved up based on the 20 links google reports as backlinks, or on the full 300?

Thanks for your thoughts on this,

[christopher]

oh, just noticed there are several other threads concerning backlinks being screwy and notices of when updates have been made. I really need to visit this forum more often!

Still wondering if my site moved up in the listings due to the few backlinks google has listed for me, or if it takes into account backlinks when it displays search results, before the links are actually listed as 'backlinks' when I look it up from the toolbar,,,,,, does that question make sense?

[cscgal]

First of all, when you do a link: query in Google, you don't get the pleasure of seeing all of the backlinks that Google knows that you have. It's just supposed to be a "sampling." Not only that, but this "sampling" has been acting screwey lately. It used to only show those pages that have a PR of 4 or greater, but now low-PR pages seem to be included as well. In addition, only a small percentage of pages from one domain or from one IP block (think of this as all the domains on a server) are shown.

[AlanM]

Google does not show all backlinks. Forget the google backlinks check - google will take into account all your links even though they do not show in google.

[mnemtsas]

The google link: search does not show all of the links to a site. In fact noone knows really why it picks to show some links over others. What IS shown by the link: search seems to be in a state of flux.

[christopher]

Hi all,

Thank you for your ideas on this, that helps a lot :) I've been trying to figure out why it wasn't doing what I expected, now I know!

Chris

[berniestein2001]

links and backlinks are only part of google's magical formula for page ranking, but in general the higher number of links in the link query, the better. but the number does fluctuate greatly from month to month at times. When I look at links for Pacific Timesheet software or others i see the count changing frequently.

[ArunPrasad1]

I think you have checked with "link:yoursite.com" command or Google toolbar to check your links. Normally, that does not show all the backlinks of a site, It is better to go along with other methods to check your backlinks like backlinkwatch.com, Yahoo explorer and etc :)