For several years now, Google has disabled its link search. Actually, what it's done is worse, providing mis and dis-information, causing thousands of search marketing professionals to receive questions every day on why "Google only knows about 10 of my links." However, I was thrilled today to find that their link search works flawlessly in their blog search engine.
For example:
- SEOmoz - 4,443 links
- Joe Morin - 49 links
- Boing Boing - 84,914 links
- Kineda - 51 links
- SFGate - 186,846 links
- ESPN - 3,669 links
When I compare it Technorati, it's obvious that Google still has a long way to go in terms of growing their blog index:
- SEOmoz - 18,378 links
- Joe Morin - 765 links
- Boing Boing - 135,730 links
- Kineda - 2,098 links
- SFGate - 224,025 links
- ESPN - 5,900 links
I'm not sure why Google is offering solid link data here and spoofing it in the normal search, but I'll take it! One more metric to add to the toolbox.
p.s. For an update, see this post on the Google Link Command.
51 links on Google Blogsearch vs. 2098 links on Technorati. Ouch... Google needs to get their index up to speed!
Thanks for sharing - now I have an idea how one of my websites gets PR4 with no incoming links when i use link:www.site.com command in G.
Hey folks,
not sure if anyone of you noticed, but what google calls "Blogsearch" is a search among the RSS feed data.
That means only site links found in RSS feeds are counted.
This means Google thinks if a site has an RSS feed, it is a blog - which is the same way technorati works - and therefore index all kinds of news portals as well..
a new metric, but with the low number of feeds indexed by Google I'm really not sure what the overall value of this would be -
be it because of low indexing or "manual" crippling - it's less detailed data , hence poor data
happy new year, christoph
Well it is not so much that the Google link: command is not functioning it is only reporting the backlinks from pages with PR>4. What struck me is that Google Blogsearch reports self cites as well. But you can't combine the link: command with the -blogurl: command in a single search action. That is a real pity. Google blogsearch doesn't count links from blogroles (it is an RSS search engine), whereas Technorati does (which might explain the larger link number to some extent).
I have always wondered about how Google counts links. Wow this still really confusing.
Great find, Rand. I seem to be doing better with Google than your sample since on my three blogs the numbers are closer.
Blog Search BPWrap: 85 links StayGoLinks: 76 links The Other Bloke's Blog: 34 links
Technorati BPWrap: 383 links StayGoLinks: 135 links The Other Bloke's Blog: 210 links
Of course the Yahoo link search is still very much better.
Yahoo link search BPWrap: 3,975 links (subdomain so link to page) StayGoLinks: 27,088 links The Other Bloke's Blog: 3,728 links (part of website so link to page)
Oh if only Google would either drop the link search entirely or make it one we could have some respect for. :(
Isn't Google going to finally have a reliable link command in their Webmaster Tools?
Hmm, for my little bloglet (Search Engine Tigers) Google Blogs shows 4 blog links, technorati 3. The interesting thing is that there's only one in common between the 2 of them, and that's my personal blog. Technorati doesn't appear to have visited the pages with the links from SearchEngineLand, and Google seems to have missed stuntdubl's link.
GOOGLE has a long way to geo??? Sheesh...Looks like I have a long way to go.
Although Yahoo linkdomain check shows me at 10,684
https://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/search?p...
Heh, so that was you visiting my site earlier Rand?
Google Blog search isn't quite so flawless
Old posts tend to bubble to the top if they receive comments, especially if you use email notification.
Andy - interesting and good to know. Does that mean they're subscribing to the comment feeds for certain blogs, or just that they use a freshness test on the content?
I am not sure what they are doing, but for some of the blog searches I have subscribed I frequently have 18 month old posts reappear due to comments.
One other interesting fact, that is related to the keyword search.
You can't use blogsearch to search for -nofollow ;)
I think blogsearch might be counting just blog links? And just to that one page, not to the whole site. Technorati might be counting all links to the site, self-links, etc.
Matt is dead on as always here. I just gave it a shot for a few sites, the links returned are just blogs.
no argument there - I didn't mean to suggest otherwise... Oh, and Matt - please don't shut it down :) For us?
I think it is better than the 'normal' link: SERPs but it still isn't right. I don't want to give specifics but look at some sites you are really familiar with.
And fer christsakes Matt, just release the real data. Spoofing content just makes Google look dumb to people that don't know any better. Of course explaining it to them doesn't really improve the situation. "Oh, so Google lies because that's not evil while they fully anticipate everyone else is evil?"
But keep messing with the PR. That's kinda fun.
Hi Matt,
Sorry to disagree but the blogsearch is not just showing links to "that one page". Whether it is showing blog links to the whole site i'm not sure, but it is definately showing links to multiple pages within my site, including the main site and the blog.
j
Excellent! Thanks, Rand. I've been racking my brain because Yahoo Site Explorer shows my blog as having 29 pages and over 7,000 inbound links, whereas Google has me at 2 pages and a bit fat ZERO links. Now, I know Google openly admits that the "link:" command just returns a sample, but 0 vs. 7,000 is a bit more than sampling error.