Could someone explain to me why if you put in link:www (your site address) etc you will always get less results than if you put a space i.e. link: www etc? I have plenty of links but when i try to list them with the first one i apparently have none?

Hi Martin,

It doesn't matter really, as neither ways of using the link operator give accurate results. You should use the operator without a space but the results are only a subset of your total links.

It's better to use Yahoo Site Explorer or Google Webmaster Tools.

The search queries are different,
doing a "link:www" search returns a sample of your site's links, while doing a "link: www" search is like searching for two seperate words (It looks for "Link:" and any page with your domain name).

try to install the SEOpen add-on tool for firefox. it will help. Its easy to use also.

regarding on checking your backlinks, better check it in yahoo for it will give much result you might be expecting than other SEs.

If your site is set up through Google Webmaster Tools you can also check the number of links that Google is "showing" as inbound links. Yahoo does show the most but going through the webmaster tools will show you more links through Google than if you were to use link:site.

Originally Posted by mapasm2003

Could someone explain to me why if you put in link:www (your site address) etc you will always get less results than if you put a space i.e. link: www etc? I have plenty of links but when i try to list them with the first one i apparently have none?

The reason behind this is you search 2 different things for both the search terms

For link:www you are searching for handful backlinks that Google has opted to show in the search results pointing to your domain.

For link:www you are searching for terms containing link: and your site name which has higher numbers than what Google shows for the first results and so you see different result set.

Originally Posted by gringo

Hi Martin,

It doesn't matter really, as neither ways of using the link operator give accurate results. You should use the operator without a space but the results are only a subset of your total links.

It's better to use Yahoo Site Explorer or Google Webmaster Tools.

Well........it matters as by using link operator (link:www.ourdomain.com) you can see a limited and quality backlinks not only for your site but also your competitor's site that may help to analyse or compare your site with others.

However using webmaster tools is also beneficial but only the site owner can see result through this and it shows most of all web presence of your site including links with "no-follow" attributes that are not consider as a backlink for a site by google....and yahoo siteexplorer shows maximum results for any site including links with "no-follow" attributes.