Trying to understand link popularity

[Mike Lewis]

Hi All,

When I do a Google search for my site using the LINK: operator, I get around 20 results -- all sites that have linked to my site.

When I do a Google search for my URL (without the LINK: operator), I get well over 100 results. These include the 20 mentioned above, plus many others that have linked to me or where my URL is mentioned for some reason.

My question is: Why are these figures different, and which is the important one for measuring link popularity and therefore SE ranking?

Thanks in advance,

Mike


__________________________________
Mike Lewis (Edinburgh, Scotland)

My sites:
Visual FoxPro (www.ml-consult.demon.co.uk)
Crystal Reports (www.ml-crystal.com)

 

[johnmak]

Hi there,

The link function in Google only shows limited results.

For more accurate results use the linkdomain function in Yahoo.

Website Design Aberdeen

 

[Mike Lewis]

Johnmark,

Thanks for your reply. I tried your suggestion: Yahoo gave me over 500 Linkdomain results. But that wasn't the point of my question. I am not trying to find all the sites that link to me. I am trying to understand how Google measures link popularity.

When you say:
The link function in Google only shows limited results

Could you clarify that please. On what basis are the results limited? Is it the first so-many sites Google finds? Or a random selection? Or what? And how does all this affect my site's ranking in Google?

Thanks.

Mike




__________________________________
Mike Lewis (Edinburgh, Scotland)

My sites:
Visual FoxPro (www.ml-consult.demon.co.uk)
Crystal Reports (www.ml-crystal.com)

 

[johnmak]

First off thats good that you havnt asked about PR ( Google page rank), instead you asked about link popularity and these is a huge difference. PR is concerned with just quantity of links. Link popularity is about quality.

Without going in depth heres a quick summary.

Generally the more links that you have pointing to your site the better. However if you have links from other sites that are relevent you will score higher. After a very quick look at your site you would want sites to link to you that are dealing with computer programming. So sites linking to you that are about this subject will help you a lot.

It would be great if a lot of your competitors would link to you. As they would be targetting the same terms and are highly RELEVANT. However this is not easy. Add your site to every directory you can find. If you can get your keywords in the anchor text, even better.





Website Design Aberdeen

 

[Mike Lewis]

JohnMark,

Thanks for that clarification, which is helpful. I take your point about the difference between page rank and link popularity, and also about the relevance of the linking sites.

I'm still curious about how Google chose the 20 sites to display on the LINK: results page, out of the 100 or more that are linking to me. This is just curiosity -- I'll continue to look for opportunities of getting links from high-quality sites (as I have been doing for several years).

Mike

__________________________________
Mike Lewis (Edinburgh, Scotland)

My sites:
Visual FoxPro (www.ml-consult.demon.co.uk)
Crystal Reports (www.ml-crystal.com)

 

[johnmak]

The results chosen from the link command are random and are in no particular order.

As mentioned above it is a very innacurate method of finding who is linking to you. Yahoos linkdomain method is much more accurate.

Website Design Aberdeen

 

[ChrisHirst]

Well;

it used to be links above a certain PR value (~TBPR4), Then it went to a random selection of somewhere between 25 and 40 % of known links, Then the percentage dropped off, Now it appears to be the worst of the bunch that gets shown.

To find all external mentions of your site (links or not) that Google have indexed use;

+ww*w.site.tld -site:ww*w.site.tld (* added to stop the autolink)



Chris.

Indifference will be the downfall of mankind, but who cares?
Woo Hoo! the cobblers kids get new shoes.
People Counting Systems

So long, and thanks for all the fish.

 

[Mike Lewis]

Johnmark,

The results chosen from the link command are random and are in no particular order.

That completely answers my question. I must say that the answer is suprising, but it does explain what I'm seeing.

Thanks for giving up your time on this lovely weekend to answer my question.

Chris,

+ww*w.site.tld -site:ww*w.site.tld

I just tried that. It gave me 1,700 hits. Amazing.

After selecting repeat the search with the omitted results included , I could see that these included dozens of separate pages on Tek Tips where I have posted messages, and lots of similar items. I wonder if these count towards my link popularity.

Thanks for your help.

Mike


__________________________________
Mike Lewis (Edinburgh, Scotland)

My sites:
Visual FoxPro (www.ml-consult.demon.co.uk)
Crystal Reports (www.ml-crystal.com)