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Google’s backlinks command stopped showing the whole story earlier this year and now shows just a small sample of backlinks, conspicuously omitting most links from high-PR pages and homepages. While this does make it much harder use google’s link: command to reverse engineer their algorithm (how long did you think they’d keep letting us do that?), it does have a side-benefit: its now much harder for your competitors to figure out where you’re getting your best backlinks.

For example: http://www.cnn.com links to http://www.novell.com/products directly from their homepage and it doesnt show in backlinks at all. Read on for more examples. Anyone have some more to add?

Example: http://www.microsoft.com/worldwide/ links to http://www.msn.com/worldwide.armx but the link: command doesn’t show that page as a backlink: http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=navclient-menuext&ie=UTF-8&q=link:http%3A%2F%2Fwww%2Emsn%2Ecom%2Fworldwide%2Earmx
which is in keeping with google’s known behavior of hiding high-PR backlinks.

Example: http://www.google.com/search?q=link:http://www.blogger.com/start&num=100&hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&c2coff=1&safe=off&filter=0 - blogger.com’s backlinks only show one link from Google, a pr7, despite the fact that they’re linked-to from this PR10 (blogger is a pr10 now) http://www.google.com/options/index.html

Example:  newly acquired picasa.com shows no links from google at all: http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=navclient-menuext&ie=UTF-8&q=link:http%3A%2F%2Fwww%2Epicasa%2Ecom%2Fcontent%2Fdownload%2Ephp%3Fsourceid%3Dpic%26subid%3Dmore

Example: http://www.w3c.org/ links to http://www.csail.mit.edu/index.php , http://www.ercim.org/, and http://www.keio.ac.jp/ from its home page yet the only pages showing up in backlinks are minor subpages.

same thing with www.usatoday.com and www.gannett.com . Gannett.com shows many backlinks from usatoday but the homepage link is conspicuously missing.

Example:  http://www.gannett.com/ gives a homepage link to www.careerbuilder.com and it doesn’t show up at all in backlinks.

gannett.com also links to usatoday.com from its homepage & doesn’t show in google backlinks either.