How Relevant Is Google's Link Checker?

I was reading Google's guidelines in the Webmaster Tools section and I read that you can see a sample of the sites that link to your site by typing link:www.yoursite.com into the search bar. Does this mean that all of the links that Google considers relevant to search results ranking are shown here? A search for link:www.warriorforum.com has only 141 results. Does that mean that the Warrior Forum really only has 141 direct backlinks that Google uses to determine its ranking? Or are links not shown here counted as well?

That's an interesting question. I think that if google didn't index a backlink (let's say it is an unfollow or the back linker got his page on noindex), they simply don't know that you got a backlink from a specifc page, if it wasn't spidered.
This is as much as I understand.

hustle4dough said:

I was reading Google's guidelines in the Webmaster Tools section and I read that you can see a sample of the sites that link to your site by typing link:www.yoursite.com into the search bar. Does this mean that all of the links that Google considers relevant to search results ranking are shown here? A search for link:www.warriorforum.com has only 141 results. Does that mean that the Warrior Forum really only has 141 direct backlinks that Google uses to determine its ranking? Or are links not shown here counted as well?

Click to expand...

Google stopped showing all the links a long time ago... Now, it's just a "sample"... yahoo site explorer gives a listing of more but is still only limited to 1000 max.

You said it well in your post. G shows you a "sample". Its not a good method for checking backlinks at all.

I usually use Y! site explorer but that too only displays 1,000, still it gives you total numbers even if you can't see all the individual links and is fairly accurate in terms of the time a link is indexed there is about the same as G starts indexing it in/factoring it for your rankings as I can tell by watching blasts.

There are of course a number of third party link checkers that will allow you to view all links and even nofollow/df, pr. anchor text and OBLs on the page etc. but I don't know how accurate any specific one is in terms of when the link shows there and when it is crawled in G which makes it difficult to monitor and test new linking strategies to see results.

I linked a few social bookmarks that are all supposedly do follow to a new site I'm working on. The site's been indexed by Google but so far the third party backlink checkers only show one of the social bookmarking links while Google's link search tool and Yahoo! Site Explorer aren't showing anything. Maybe they just need more time.

hustle4dough said:

I linked a few social bookmarks that are all supposedly do follow to a new site I'm working on. The site's been indexed by Google but so far the third party backlink checkers only show one of the social bookmarking links while Google's link search tool and Yahoo! Site Explorer aren't showing anything. Maybe they just need more time.

Click to expand...

Can take awhile... You could ping the bookmark urls to try and get the crawled quickly...

Correct, having run a bunch of different websites in my day, and manually acquired backlinks through some old-school business dealing, I can say for sure that the Google link checker and link: will not show you all of the links that you have acquired.

You ain't gonna see all the links to any site.

Google are awesome like that.