Linking TO, not showing up

[Robban]

If I check linking TO in on google: link: www.yourURL.com I see about 10-15 sites that link to my site. I know for a fact that more than 50 sites links to my site and many of those have been linking for quite a while.

Why do not more sites show up? Alexa "reports" only two sites linking to my site. Why is this? Is there anyhting I can do to make more of the "link to me" sites show up..?

Also does Google and other crawlers only recongnize these few links to establish my ranking or do they "know better"...?

WebProWorld Rocks.

[cbp]

Google have only ever shown a "sample" of links and never all of them. In the past the criteria for being in the sample was a PR threshold (probably a very high 3) - in the past it took couple of the traditional style updates to pick up all and occasionaly a few were missed and a lower PR one got in.

Now the criteria for a link being in the sample is not totally clear, though a PR threshold is still one criteria.

I assume the reason that they only show a sample is to save on computing resources (webmasters rather than searhers use this) and to prevent reverse engineering.

CBP

[Mel]

Hi Robban:

As CBP has said Google is rather stingy with the links information that is shares with us mortals, though you can be pretty sure that they do know a lot more than they are revealing. They do use many more links in comututing PR and Ranking than they reveal to users

Alexa is skewed a bit the other way they report based on a very small sample but like you to believe that they know all the answers.

I like to check links in Alltheweb.com which has almost as big an index as Google (maybe bigger if you only compare with Googles main index) and it will give you a more complete picture of who is linking to you. Finding external links in ATW is simple, just enter your url in the search bar and on the resulting page click the link that says it will find all the external links to this site.

ATW results may not be identical to what Google would give you if it was willing to share its information, but IMO it is about 90% accurate.

[smakyyy]

Some times my sites show links in the hundreds and in some months they show single digits, anyone have any thoughts?

[minstrel]

Originally Posted by smakyyy

Some times my sites show links in the hundreds and in some months they show single digits, anyone have any thoughts?

That depends on how you are searching for them (see above) but I have noticed that with any method lately the results Google displays are variable. It doesn't mean that Google doesn't know about them, nor does it mean they aren't all helping your site - maybe Google is trying to discourage people from doing backlinks searches...