Surely if google has had 20k Visits to my site it should be more than only 600 links in its database? even its cache for my site isnt working properly...

WinSrev,

the link: operator only shows a selection of backlinks for google (assuming that's what you've used). Also, it doesn't necessarily follow that lots of backlinks means lots of hits (though they'll help probably your chances).

Oh, okay. Thanks.

Are those 20k visits from googlebot or from searches going through Google. When googlbot visits your site it's not finding backlinks to it. It finds the backlinks when it visits the sites that have links to yours.

If those 20k visits are from searches through Google then congrats.

If you use a tilde (~) instead of link: in front of your domain Google will show a lot more of the backlinks to your site though I'm not sure if it's all of them.

Try ~yourdomain.com and you'll see the difference.

Using a tilde gives the same results as "domain.com" in quotes for me.

You're right. I had never notcied that before. I had read about using the tilde on another forum a long time ago.

I had gotten the impression it was showing backlinks, but now I'm thinking it's just showing any site that has your domain name in the content like the "" would do.

I think in many cases when your site is mentioned on another site it will be in a link. Obviously that won't always be the case. I guess using either the tilde or the "" will give an upper limit on your backlinks and using link: will give you a minimum with your actualy backlinks being somewhere in between. I think for smaller sites without a lot of links this upper limit will be fairly close to the actual number of backlinks since smaller sites typically aren't mentioned a lot except in links.

For larger sites I would think the the number of backlinks would move farther off this theoretical upper limit.

Thoose 20k hits are googlebot.