Did you guys ever hear these questions:
1. I worked my butt off for the last 3 weeks submitting my website to over 300 directories, but Google is only showing 20 of those directories! What has gone wrong? OR
2. I KNOW for a fact that I used Bookmarking Demon/Social Poster to build over 1000 links and NONE of them are showing up. There must be a problem somewhere! (This is not a question) OR
3. I can actually see that my rankings have improved since I started submitting links but when I check Google, only 10% of my links are indexed! Where did I mess up?
If you ever asked these questions and are still confused about this topic, this is the article for you!
A lot of people understand that Google is the best search engine out there. I guess it is for this reason that they think that Google is the “God of search engines” which provides all results accurately and transparently! This idea is FAR from being true, for a lot of reasons.
First of all, Google comes with a lot of filters. Your backlinks might not show for reasons such as:
1. Incoming links to your website were from a crappy neighborhood and will not be showed in search.
2. Incoming links were not “good enough”or were due to “repeated posts” on the “same topic” and will not be showed more than once.
3. Google is not obligated to show all the links, because many of them have no good content attached to them.
4. Google’s system of “showing the links” is at least 1-3 months lagging – which means that you should wait up will 3 months to have a ROUGH idea of how many links are indexed.
So if you do not see enough links “indexed” in Google, chances are they are indexed but not showing up. You do however get credit for them, which should be reflected in increased rankings.
Yahoo Site Explorer, on the other hand, is a bit more “accurate” in this regard. I have had instances when Yahoo Site Explorer showed me having 600 links to my website, while Google showed me only 20. So there is a huge difference between these two competing engines.
If you need to see a rough number of links to your website, check out the following tools:
1. DNScoop
2. Site Value Check
3. Yahoo Site Explorer.
All of these tools lag and will never show you the exact links you have, but they are better than Google in this regard.