[WEB4LIB] Re: Tool to check sites that link to your site?

[Richard Wiggins]

Good point.  Hmmm.  I wonder if this is an artifact of Google's PageRank
link analysis?  I have observed, and Google's help screens confirm, that a
page that is not linked to will disappear from Google.  If a page exists on
the Web but no one links to it, apparently in Google's opinion it doesn't
really exist.

Thus, if the page that links to you is itself not linked to, Google may not
show it to you.

Or we could go with a conspiracy theory that Google doesn't want to enable
mining of its link network.  Personally I like the PageRank theory.  Is
there a [Danny Sullivan | Gredg Notess | Gary Price | etc] take on this?

If this theory is right, then Google's list of links to your page may still
be superior to AltaVista's.   An exhaustive list of everyone who links to
you might be interesting, but a list of sites with some gravitas that link
to you might be more useful.

/rich



On Sat, 16 Nov 2002, Patricia F Anderson wrote:

> 
> Just a quick comment. I did a small informal study comparing various
> search engines in the number of links retrieved with the link to options,
> and also comparing the results with searching the URL as a text string in
> the same engine. Unfortunately, the preliminary results are posted on a
> secured site, and I can't give you all copies or the methodology used.
> 
> In brief, Altavista won, hands down, and in this respect Google's lack of
> ability is embarassing. You will have better luck in Google finding sites
> that link to yours searching the URL as a text string, and manually
> reviewing the links on the page to see if they are active or not. Most
> are. What puzzles me is why the Google link to search doesn't work when
> the pages are clearly in their database. Also, Google doesn't allow
> truncation of the search string in the link to command, but Altavista
> does. Makes a significant difference in the utility of the results.
> 
> Patricia Anderson, pfa at umich.edu
> 

____________________________________________________
Richard Wiggins
Writing, Speaking, and Consulting on Internet Topics
rich at richardwiggins.com       www.richardwiggins.com