Google “link:” Command is Overrated

Google has a ton of different tools available inside of the Google interface.  You can check to see all the pages on a single site, you can look through specific title tags, and with the “link:” command you can see links to a particular page or site.

However, this command is by no means the main tool you should use to get backlinks.  There are several holes in this command, and Google themselves advise to take it with a grain of salt.  SEOmoz has a great post about several misconceptions on this command.

So how do you get a decent report on backlinks?  There’s no perfect tool, but the two I’d recommend using are the Google Webmaster Tools and the Yahoo Site Explorer.  Both give a much better amount of information than the “link:” command and can give you a better concept on just what kind of backlinks a site has.  Which, as we all know, is indicative of the quality of SEO for a particular page.