Comments on: Everything You Ever Wanted To Know About SEO (but were afraid to ask)

By: Michael Martinez

Michael Martinez — Wed, 23 Apr 2008 16:23:06 +0000

Google’s “link:” query operator has always provided less than a full report on links Google knows about, but for the past few years Google has only reported a random selection of links (apparently because many people with at least a smidgen of SEO knowledge were constantly checking link profiles).

The Webmaster Tools link reports are completely useless because they are incomplete, outdated, and don’t distinguish between links that pass value (links from pages in the Main Web Index) and links that don’t pass value (links from pages in the Supplemental Results Index).

You can use Google’s “link:” query operator to get a quick idea of how strong a site may be in terms of relative PageRank. You would probably be safe to assume that reported links are probably passing value, so if you have a site that gets 16 links in a Google link report and you’re comparing it to a site that gets 300 links in the Google report, you don’t need to guess about which site has the stronger link profile.

As far as NoFollow on internal links go, using it only hurts a Web site’s search visibility. Any site whose “About Us” page comes up for something other than “About X” and related queries is badly optimized. The correct solution for such problems is to properly optimize the site, not to “sculpt PageRank”.

In other words, if you run a query for your site name or company name and your “About” page shows first, the reason it’s showing first is that your on-site optimization sucks and using rel=nofollow will only make your on-site optimization suck more.

People who optimize correctly to begin with don’t resort to using rel=nofollow on internal links. They don’t need to remove “incidental” pages from their search results.

Even login pages need to be search visible because people often use site search to locate such pages. Nofollowing your internal content has absolutely no rational justification.

By: Ken Jones

Ken Jones — Tue, 22 Apr 2008 11:15:30 +0000

Thanks Frank.
What struck me as particularly odd though was the fact that the link: command doesn’t return any results at all. I know they don’t want to show a complete list of all the links, but I’m still wondering why they refuse to show any.
That’s what got me thinking it may have something to do with being “sandboxed”
I guess I’ll just have to be patient and wait until the next toolbar PR update and see if Google wants to start showing link: results at the same time that the bar goes green.

By: Frank H M

Frank H M — Tue, 22 Apr 2008 10:10:18 +0000

The link-command in Google has been made almost useless on purpose, is my understanding. For any website, the link-command will only return a fraction of the links pointing towards that site.

The motive is of course to keep SEO’s guessing about the number of backlinks indexed in Google for the websites of other people.

For ones own sites, they have introduced the backlink part of webmaster tools.