hi everyone

When I search for my band digitalTRAFFIC on google.com there are some 12 000 links  or references to this term - but i can only see 100 odd pages.

can anyone explain how to get access to view all the results or is there a cutoff at say 1000 link references.

I know these will not all be links to my site or to my band but it would be interesting to find out just what these links or references to digitaltraffic are.

Of note: when I search on yahoo.com I get a more realistic 1000+ references

hope someone can shine some light on this issue

thanks for your time / input

best regards
donaldo

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No matter what you search for on google, you'll never be able to go past the 1000 mark

I believe you are referring to Google's link: operator?
It is intentionally set up not to return all of your backlinks, just what Google calls a sampling.
Using Msn will give you a realistic count of your links and Yahoo! Site Explorer will show you every instance.
Why does Google do this? Who the hell knows. Most people hypothesize it is done to make it harder to game the search engine's algo. I don't buy it. Maybe it saves bandwidth. And maybe its done just cause your not likely to click on any ads.
IMO Use Msn to check your backlinks.
Dan

digitalTRAFFIC wrote:

hi everyone

When I search for my band digitalTRAFFIC on google.com there are some 12 000 links  or references to this term - but i can only see 100 odd pages.
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Google only shows a sampling of IBL's. And when they show actual results, they will only show up to 1000 of the links they give credit for in their search results.

Although you might have 12,000 links out there, Google will only give you credit for those links that reside on pages that have some PageRank on them. I am really unsure of what level PageRank they require those pages to have on them, but certain indications leave me to believe that the cut-off is in the range of PR3 or PR4. Even if the page does have the requisite PR, there are other factors that go into making the final determination as to which links they will show in their results.

Yahoo and MSN are also guilty of showing only a sampling of the IBL's that point to your website. But, their algorithms are much less restrictive than the Google algo.

On one of my sites, I know the real number of IBL's I have is in excess of 50k, but Google only gives me credit for 130, while Yahoo gives me credit for about 1200, and MSN  gives me credit for about 2400. The way it breaks down on my sites is that MSN is showing the most IBL's and they only give credit for just under 5% of the real total.

All of the engines are still guilty of showing IBL's to your domain from your own domain as part of their results. That is just silly in my book.

Yahoo and MSN also include a portion of the links that come out of the Yahoo Group mailings in addtion to real webpages. Personally, I don't count those as real IBL's since most people read the mailings, but not the online archives.

The closest I have come to getting a real count of what is out there is to put your domain name in quotes and run a search on it, for example, "domain.com" . But, it must be said that this will generally show you more than what is actually out there, because not all of those mentions of your domain name will have an actual hyperlink attached to it. It is my assessment that the real number is somewhere in between MSN's link count and the search for "domain.com" results.

Of course, that number will be influenced by exactly how you build your links. Do you have most of your links set up for "keywords only" in the anchor text, or a mix of "keywords only" and your domain name in the anchor text? In my case, I always put a text version of the url near my actual keyworded links, so a search for the domain name is close to accurate, minus the estimated number of people who cheat the hyperlink requirements with the use of my domain name on their site.


Bill Platt

hi guys

just a quick note to say thank you Northie Dann and Bill very much for the quick responses and answers to my query - makes more sense now.

all the very best
donaldo