Link Counting - Why?
One of the obsessions in the SEO/SEM world is counting links.Why?
What will you do differently if it shows 25 backlinks but you know there is more than 25?
Would you believe it of it showed MORE than you think you have?
Google and Yahoo! have specific commands to display the links to a particular URI. And neither of the
For Google it is Search Google for link:www.modtalk.co.uk, that command (in theory) should show all the links that point to the "home" page of this site, but it doesn't, and it NEVER has done.
Yahoo! does not fare much better, there are TWO queries that can be used. One is the same syntax as Google Search Yahoo for link:www.modtalk.co.uk the other is [search="yahoo"]linkdomain:www.modtalk.co.uk[/search.
The link: command works in the same way as at Google and should return the links that point to the site root, linkdomain: however should return the indexed links that point to any page on the site.
MSN/Live/Bing disabled their link: and linkdomain: search commands in March 2007 and maybe some day the others may follow suit.
There is nothing to be gained from monitoring the number of links that have been indexed by any search engine. The search only ever shows a random scattering of pages that link to your site and it does not tell you whether the pages shown are of any "value" to that SE.
Your time would be much better used in monitoring your site access logs or your analytics tool for direct referrers.
As Albert Einstein said:
"Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted."
This article was added by Chris Hirst and was posted on 19 October 2009. Chris has been a member since 09 January 2008 and has written 29 article(s) for modTalk
So long, and thanks for all the fish.
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20 May 2010 at 14:30
thanks for the tips.. you are right.. counting backlinks is useless.. we should spend more of our time to build more links..
Hmmm?
13 June 2010 at 12:13
Not strictly true:
Sure build the RIGHT kind of links but building any kind of links is equally futile.
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