The link operator allows you to see who is linking to you in Google’s eyes as well as who may be linking to your competition.  The way that you use Google’s link operator, is to just go to Google, enter in the word link and then a colon and then the URL of the site.  Like so:

The biggest gripe that people have had with the link operator is that it doesn’t show you a true count of links pointing to a website.  Matt’s explanation for this is that the reason Google doesn’t show all of the backlinks is that “spammers or competitors could use that to reverse someone’s ranking.”

Thank goodness there’s still tools available like Yahoo’s site explorer tool to get numbers of backlinks to any one site.

As it stands, even using Yahoo’s tool will only locate up to 1,000 backlinks for any domain, which still doesn’t touch the tip of the iceberg when you’re up against a highly competitive site.  Take for example, CNN.com who easily has hundreds of thousands of incoming links to their site.

But, even so, the Site Explorer tool will give you plenty of data to start working on your own link-building campaign for your site.

I can’t say I see eye-to-eye on Google about this restriction simply because the Internet is “The Internet”.  If our websites were meant to be private then we’d password protect directories, exclude directories and pages within our robots.txt files, and more which many sites already do.

My take on the explanation is that Google just doesn’t “want” to show you all of the backlinks because you would in fact be able to reverse-engineer how Google ranks sites.  And since the data that you receive from Yahoo! is based on information contained at Yahoo! then you still aren’t able to reverse engineer any data from Google.

He does however go on to say that if you want to see all of your backlinks for your site, that all you need to do is sign up and use Google’s webmaster central which is helpful to see more information about your own sites.  But as far as not showing all backlinks to any one given site, well, I could probably write an entire opinion piece on how Google tracks nearly every move you make but when it comes to information that should be available to the general public it closes up shop.

You’re an intelligent person, I’d love to hear your thoughts on this.

Many new website owners are often told that in order to start getting good incoming links, they need to focus on web pages that have high PageRanks first to get those links from.

While a PageRank does come into play in certain circumstances, it is not the be-all-end-all of getting a good incoming link.

First let’s talk about what PageRank is and why it’s become such a sought-after item.

PageRank is the value that Google (not Yahoo!, not MSN) assigns to a web PAGE depending on how important Google believes that page to be.

Google of course doesn’t tell us all of the factors that make a page “important” or “unimportant” but rather leaves it up to the community at large to try and decipher.

That being said, we do know a few things about how web pages do get better PageRanks. One of the most important factors are the incoming links to a web page. Note that I said “web page” and not “web site”. Each web page on your site is ranked differently than all of the other pages on your site.

If you by chance have a web page that has a PageRank of 6 for example, this does not mean that your entire website has a PageRank or PR of 6, it just means that the one page on your site has a PR of 6.

Back to the matter at hand…we know that the more important the links are pointing to your web pages, the more that Google will likely view your page as important thus giving it a better PR. However, the links that point to your web pages are not the only factors that determine whether or not your web pages get a good PR. There are other factors such as how well your site is laid out, what kind of content you have on that web page, if that web page is “information driven” or “money driven”, etc.

So now that we know at least a portion of what gives a web page good PR, let’s talk about how this factors into incoming links.

Many new website owners are led to believe that in order for their web pages to get to the top of a search results page they must have a number of high PR sites linking to them.

Why this can be so detrimental is because the PR you often see listed for a web page is rarely the actual PR of the page. Google updates the PageRanks that you and I see on a very intermittent basis. However, the PR of a web page is constantly moving up or down on Google’s side of things.

While it is rare that a PR of a page would move drastically in one direction or another, it should not be the only factor that you use when determining who to attempt to get links from.

While it can be helpful to have a high PR site linking to you (high PR being 5 or above), you should not simply focus on getting links from sites that have these high PageRanks.

What most people forget is that there is a natural flow of links that come to any one web page. No one site, even those with high PR’s such as Google themselves or CNN.com for example, have all high PR sites linking to them. Website owners all over the internet are linking to these sites because they contain high-quality information that their site visitors would find helpful.

And the links coming to these sites run the gamut from PR0 sites all the way up to high PR sites, those with PR’s of 6 or above.

The bottom line is, it is the number of links, how relevant those links are to the overall theme of your website, what words are contained in the anchor text they’re using (the clickable portion of the text), how many sites are linking to THAT site, and more.

It’s important to note that just because a web page has a high PR does not mean that it will automatically rank well in the search engines, which is what most website owners are after when they first head out and attempt to find links to their own site.

Instead, it’s important to focus on simply getting links to your site rather than focusing on what the PR of those sites are.

One of the first things I tell people when looking to get links to their site is to first determine who is linking to their competition.  If you simply do a Google search for a keyword you’re focusing on, and determine who is listed in the top 10 positions in a Google and then further determine who is linking to them you’ll be at a much greater advantage than just those who simply seek out high PR sites to get links from.

The bottom line is when you’re first working on getting links to your site, the last thing you should concern yourself with is the PR of a site.  Instead, focus on getting links from the same places your competitors are and be absolutely certain that the site you’d like to get a link from is relevant to the content on your own web page.

Since the client didn’t want any outgoing links and had such a high PR on the site, the person who had developed the site wanted to know if it was ok to put the same color text on the same color background on a few of the pages, linking to the developers own sites.

This is called “invisible text” and will label you a spammer, at least where the search engines are concerned.  Your own personal moral character might not feel that way but to put it frankly, that doesn’t matter.

Needless to say, I recommended (strongly I might add) that they refrain from doing so.  Actually following through and doing such a thing would likely cause not only the site with the invisible text to get banned but the site it links to, to get banned as well.

In our BoneheadSEO classes that are coming up in 2009, we’ll cover black-hat techniques in great detail so that you can be fully aware of the tactics that may get you banned.

We’ll talk soon.

Whether those backlinks come from Ezine Articles itself or from another website who has published your content.

However, in the future EzineArticles.com will no longer follow the links within your body text.  It appears that as of now they will still follow the links in your author’s bio.

This is not yet implemented but look for it very soon in the future.

- Kristine