Google's Display of Your Backlinks is Incomplete

When you check the number of backlinks to your site using 'link:www.yoursite.com' at Google the results returned are not complete. It can be especially dissappointing when you are just starting a link building campaign and Google doesn't appear to be picking up on your hard-earned incoming links.

The fact is, Google deliberately does not display all of the backlinks it is aware of pointing to your site. Both Yahoo! and MSN will display a great deal more backlinks including all those scraper sites that just use software to generate useless content. Google will filter out sites linking to you that it considers as low quality. This is a good reason to seek out backlinks that are related to your site's subjects and are also from sites Google considers to be of a higher quality.

There are a number of factors Google will consider when deciding the quality of the site linking to yours. You can look out for a few warning signs yourself:

• is the page indexed by Google (check Google's 'cache' - the Google Toolbar is an easy aid to monitor this)
• the page is indexed but does it have any PageRank? If so, how much?
• will your link provide SEO benefit - can search engine spiders follow it? (This will depend on how the website owner decides to code your link)

There are other factor in play and any professional search engine marketing firm will be able to help you build links that will help improve your search engine positions.