No, it doesn’t. ‘Link:’ only shows a sample, a subsample of backlinks that we know about. It’s a random sample; it’s not like we only show the high PageRank backlinks. That’s what we used to do, and then anyone who had PageRank 4 or below, wasn’t able to see their backlinks; because they weren’t in a high PageRank, they weren’t getting high PageRank links.
We made it more fair by randomizing which backlinks we would show, and also sort of doubled the number of backlinks we were going to show at that time.
Now, what’s interesting is that, if you only show links that flow PageRank or that we trust or that don’t have nofollow, then people could kind of reverse-engineer that and say ‘Oh, I’ll try to get the links that are really valuable’. So we show the links that do carry a lot of “credit” in our system, and we do show the links that we don’t really trust or don’t really carry a lot of “credit” in our system.
It’s just truly a random sample of stuff that’s just nofollow, stuff that’s followed, stuff that we do believe a lot, stuff we don’t trust as much etc.
Just because you don’t see one particular link in ‘link:’ doesn’t mean that it doesn’t or does flow reputation, PageRank, whatever you want to refer to as.
If it’s your own site, you can use Google’s Webmaster console, sign up and get a very complete list, a vast majority of links that we know about that you can even download as a CSV file.
If you really do want to want to get a really good idea of backlinks, that’s the place to go and get a pretty exhaustive list of links according to Google.
Related posts:
- Seeing as the “link:” search query is hardly ever accurate, what would your favorite/preferred way to check for inbound links be if you were a webmaster?
- As Google’s algorithms evolve, is it better to have exceptional links and mediocre content, or exceptional content and mediocre links? By links I mean inbound link quality/quantity. Can you sites with awesome content outrank mediocre/established sites?
- Do you feel that the widespread and blanket use of nofollow tags is devaluing Google’s search algorithms? Examples such as Wikipedia, where ALL external links are nofollow. Does Wikipedia mean nothing to Google’s algorithms? Do Google take into account quality factors from nofollowed links when the links come from the well established authority websites, such as Wikipedia?
- Does Google value its own links for PR/Linkjuice? Google Bookmarks, Google Profiles, etc. Reason – Google links never appear in Webmaster Tools
- Does anchor text carry through all 301 redirects? Will there be a penalty for sites that do this as their sole way of link building?
