Backlinks - two methods reveal totally different numbers!

minorgod · #1 (**permalink**) 08-17-2005, 01:53 PM

I have a real estate web site that ranks among the top sites for our keywords on both Google and MSN, but over a year ago we disappeared from all the top results in Yahoo. Recently, I've resumed my investigations of why this might have happened and I started by looking for sites that might be stealing our content or doing redirect hijacking of our pages. That's when I noticed that Yahoo returns totally different backlink counts depending on how you type in your web address. For example (using someone else's domain), if you type

Code:

link: homes.com

into Yahoo's search, it returns 48,200,000 hits. However if you type it like this:

Code:

link:http://www.homes.com

you get 2,260,000 hits. Notice how there's a space after the "link:" in the first one above? That's the only way it works. The second one does not work with a space after the work "link:". Very strange indeed. I hope someone can tell my why there's such a discrepancy between the two methods and which one is correct.

coder · #2 (**permalink**) 08-17-2005, 03:51 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by minorgod

Code:

link: homes.com

into Yahoo's search, it returns 48,200,000 hits. However if you type it like this:

Code:

link:http://www.homes.com

link:http://www.homes.com is the correct way to find backlinks

the other way is showing SE results for the two phrases link and homes.com

bugmenot · #3 (**permalink**) 08-19-2005, 12:25 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by minorgod

Code:

link: homes.com

into Yahoo's search, it returns 48,200,000 hits. However if you type it like this:

Code:

link:http://www.homes.com

you get 2,260,000 hits. Notice how there's a space after the "link:" in the first one above? That's the only way it works. The second one does not work with a space after the work "link:". Very strange indeed. I hope someone can tell my why there's such a discrepancy between the two methods and which one is correct.

You run homes.com and have a millions of baclinks and are worried a few are not showing up?? Who cares, your site makes 100's of thousands a day off the SERPs. Anyone here should be so lucky to have your "problem" Most of use lose100's a day on PPC..