Google’s Link Operator – What’s it REALLY Holding Back?
I just finished watching a Matt Cutts video (an engineer from Google) talking about the Google link operator and found some of what he said quite interesting, or at least PC (Politically Correct). (see video below):
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.
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