Why Isn’t Google Showing Me All My Links?

by Tinu

Because Google is a tricky, sneaky lit­tle so and so, that’s why.

Okay that’s not really the answer. To get to that answer, we have to look at the two ways you’re most likely to find link­ing point­ing back to your site using Google.

The first method is to use Google’s advanced search oper­a­tors, par­tic­u­larly the info: search. When you put in your site, you’ll find a page that looks like this:

Full sized ver­sion here to read the text that helps you maneu­ver through the page.

As a quick and dirty method of find­ing out what Google knows about your site, this isn’t a bad method. But it has one major flaw. Google has shared in recent years that when you click on “links” on this page, it isn’t show­ing you ALL links. As you can imag­ine, click­ing on some­thing that says “Find pages that link to” and not see­ing ALL pages that link to the item in ques­tion is kind of confusing.

Another option is using Google Web­mas­ter Tools to dis­cover your links. Google now has a whole blog that will tell you more about its resources for web­mas­ters, includ­ing updates about inbound links and other link infor­ma­tion.

The draw­back of Google Web­mas­ter Tools is that you have to enter your infor­ma­tion into Google and ver­ify your site. Not really a draw­back if you ask me, but not every­one wants to share more infor­ma­tion with Google in order to get data they feel they’re enti­tled to, out of Google.

For more infor­ma­tion about the links point­ing to your site, try these resources;

• SEOMoz’s Professional’s Guide to Advanced Search Operators
• SEO­Moz also has Open Site Explorer, which rocks, and is set to fill the gap that will be left when Yahoo Site Exploreris retired in a few monthsWarn­ing: Yahoo’s login is buggy on some browsers and will not let you log in even if you have the right pass­word. Note that you do NOT have to log in if you aren’t sub­mit­ting your site, just use the Explore URL option at the top.
• Back­link Watch is a low, tech, some­times buggy tool, but for a quick glance at your top links and anchor text, you don’t have to log in to use it.
• Matt Cutt’s blog — head of the web spam team. Whole sec­tion on Google and SEO.
• Google’s Web­mas­ter Cen­tral — don’t gloss over the blog and video chan­nel, they’re quite helpful