Google’s Strange Backlink System

• Posted by Badi Jones on August 10th, 2005 - Comment on this Post »

The following is from Mel Nelson of Economical Expert Search Engine Optimization. He’s a really smart guy, and his website is full of some of the best resources for SEO.

Anyhow, Here is one of his posts from the Google Forum at WebWorkShop.net. I just thought these were 2 true jewls from what GoogleGuy said.

Quote:Mel
There is a thread at webmasterworld which was closed to everyone except GoogleGuy so he could respond to a series of questions posed there. Its now two months old but still relevant.

As always you need to read between the lines, but I found a few nuggets there, though not the particular one I was searching for.

a couple of quotes that I found interesting:

Quote:GoogleGuy
The external backlinks/PR that we show have at least a couple factors that complicate analysis. First off, they are a snapshot in time, and the actual backlinks/PageRank used for ranking are from a different time interval. Another complicating factor is that we don’t show every backlink on Google; we only show a subset of the backlinks we have internally.

Quote:GoogleGuy
Just as a guide for people who don’t eat and breathe WebmasterWorld, we typically show new backlink sample sets every 3-5 weeks or so. We have a bank of machines that computes PageRank continuously (and continually, I suppose; I wasn’t an English major), but we only export new visible PageRanks every 3-4 months or so.

This could explain the Alternative Backlinks we are seeing in the Google Alternative BL, PR, DIR tool, which many times displays backlinks and PageRank values that a normal Google query wont show.

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