A little while ago I posted a bunch of Big Dumb Noob SEO Questions, along with their corresponding answers (if I had them) and a couple of really cool SEOs stopped by to help add their answers to the comments as well.

There was one question in particular that I still didn’t feel like I had a satisfactory answer for.  Until now that is…

Why do Yahoo Site Explorer, Webmaster Centre, Google Webmaster Tools and WP-Blog Stats (a really handy plugin - BTW) all show a wide variety of links pointing towards my sight now, but a simple link:www.seopscentre.com query on Google doesn’t return any results at all?

There was a lot of talk about how Google has devalued the link: query as a way of discouraging SEOs from overusing it to investigate the link profiles of competing sites and it only ever returns a very small percentage of the total number of links that Google knows about.
The thing is that what I was really trying to figure out and didn’t seem able to get a definitive answer for was why the link: query returned absolutely no results for my site at all.  I suggested the theory that it might have been because my site was still so new that it may have been “sandboxed” and decided that I would just be patient and wait for the next time Google did an update of the Toolbar PageRank display to see if there would be a connection between the two events.

Then, yesterday Google updated TPR and my little green bar lit up so I figured it’d be a good time to check my theory about whether or not Google would now give me a response to a link: query.

Lo and behold!  Now if I Google link:www.seopscentre.com it gives me a response.  The number of links it shows is considerably lower than the number of links that I know are pointing towards my site (much less than 10% in fact) but that’s to be expected.  What I have noticed about all of the linking pages that it does show for me is that (as far as I can tell by using Joost’s Link Analysis plugin for Firefox and cross referencing them with the links shown in Webmaster tools) all the links that are shown in the link: query results are “followed” links and appear to be passing PageRank.

Now, I realise that one single site isn’t exactly a large enough sample to qualify as a definitive SEO experiment, but I don’t think anyone can argue that it’s mere coincidence that Google has started showing results on link: queries for this site on the exact same day that their latest update gave the site a Toolbar PageRank display for the very first time.  I intend to keep track of the results for this site and I also have a couple of other new sites I’ve been working on that are just about to go live, so I’ll be able to record and compare what happens with them when the next PageRank update occurs as well.  Still not the hugest sample ever, but at least I’ll be able to apply the observe, evaluate, re-test (lather, rinse, repeat) principles to trying to figure this out.

I’d be very interested to hear from anyone else who has started a new site and noticed the same phenomenon.  Has Google suddenly started giving you results for a link: query on your site now that the latest update has gone through?

It’s also got me wondering about a few other things as well.
For instance, does this mean I’m officially out of the “sandbox” now?  I’ll have to keep a close eye on my SERP appearances and rankings to see if there’s any discernible upswing.
If my TPR increases in the next update will the number/percentage of links that Google shows rise as well?  I’ll have to keep track of these figures on a regular basis for the next few months to get a proper idea about that one.

Does any of this matter any way?  Should I just forget all this malarkey and carry on trying to build up quality content in my site and earning more links from valuable sources without getting bogged down in the minutia of silly little details like this?

Probably, yes.

But it’s still interesting to try and get a handle on this stuff and I wouldn’t be sticking to the whole “Learning by Doing” motto if I didn’t try.