Member Avatar for 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,

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  • Latest Post Latest Post by ArunPrasad1

Dani AI

Generated

Short answer: the public Google link: results are only a small, unreliable sample, and Google will count many links it knows about even when the public list shows far fewer. As , and noted, the visible “link:” output is not an exhaustive backlink list; Google engineers have advised not to rely on it. (searchenginejournal.com)

Why you see 300 vs ~20: Google’s reports and exports are sampled, deduplicated and grouped (canonical/root-domain grouping), and they reflect what Google has crawled and indexed — not a live feed of every new link. That means multiple links from the same site can be combined, and newly created links may take days or weeks to appear in any report. The official Links report explains these limits. ()

Practical next steps (to diagnose and track this properly):

  1. Verify your site as a property in Google Search Console and open the Links report (External links → Top linking sites/pages).
  2. Use the report’s Export options (Latest links vs More sample links) to compare what Google has discovered; exports can be sampled or limited.
  3. Cross-check with one or two third‑party backlink indexes (expect different counts — each tool has its own crawler and index).
  4. Focus on referring domains and the quality of linking sites, not raw link totals.
  5. If you find a spam attack, try removal first and only use Google’s Disavow tool in the cases Google recommends (manual action or large-scale spam). ()

Conclusion: your ranking rise could absolutely be driven by the real links Google has crawled even if link: shows only 20. Treat the toolbar / link: query as noise, use Search Console as the authoritative place to inspect what Google has seen, and prioritize link quality and monitoring. (searchengineland.com)

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Member Avatar for 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?

Member Avatar for Dani

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.

Member Avatar for 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.

Member Avatar for 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.

Member Avatar for 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

Member Avatar for 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.

Edited by jay 11 because: removed link. Please keep discussions on site
Member Avatar for ArunPrasad1

I think you have checked with "link:" 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 :)

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