I have traded links with several sites and they are listed on google, but when I do a google search for link:fungames.sitesled.com it says only 2 are pointed to me and I have exchaned with more than those 2. How come this is happening?

Google doesn't show all the links that they have indexed.

One theory - google has recently been trying to improve the quality of its index by only counting backlinks from sites it deems relevant. So, as chrishirst mentioned, they won't show all the links they have indexed (only the relevent ones).

Google never seems to show all of a site's incoming links - just a small selection of them. Keep in mind though that just because a link isn't shown that doesn't necessarily mean that it isn't still beneficial for your ranking.

If you want a more accurate idea of how many backlinks you have, you should try using http://search.msn.com for this purpose.

Google only shows the backlinks that are "important" to them.

I read somewhere that the google shows only 1/18th of the backlinks, thats the reason google shows less backlinks for a particular site than any other search engine. I am not sure if that is true or not.

I'm not sure about the 1/18th statistic, but what I can tell you is that G has 388 link pointing to my site SearchBliss, and the other SE's have around 12,000, give or take a 1000.

Originally Posted by kline11

I'm not sure about the 1/18th statistic, but what I can tell you is that G has 388 link pointing to my site SearchBliss, and the other SE's have around 12,000, give or take a 1000.

my personal theory is that google mainly shows links from pages that fall into similar catergories to that of your site and links from authority sites as well as a high percentage of links from domains thats index page have a bit of page rank. I think it ignores links on pages that have a conflicting catergory, duplicate content or low page rank.

But its just a theory.