question about google and links

[Skeewe]

When I type in Google: "link:www.mysite.com" i got 4 results, at same time MSN gives me about 90 results for same.

Why Google thinks only 4 sites have link to me?
Is that becose it takes time ?
I was indexed on MSN much earlier than on Google so I figured Google does those things much slower, am I right ?

Regards;

[etech-martin]

How old is your site? Generally sites do get indexed faster in MSN as compared to Google. Give keep on building quality links to your site and give it some more time.

[Mike Empuria]

Apparently it's something Google are aware of and are doing something to speed it up.

[r2d2]

Google never seems to show all your links. Try it out for some different sites, eg:

BBC has ~70k in Google: http://www.google.com/search?q=link%3Ahttp%3A//www.bbc.co.uk/

almost 900k in Yahoo: http://search.yahoo.com/search?p=link%3Ahttp%3A//www.bbc.co.uk/+-site%3Abbc.co.uk

over 300k in MSN: http://search.msn.com/results.aspx?q=link%3Ahttp%3A//www.bbc.co.uk/+-site%3Abbc.co.uk

[Masetek]

Google only ever shows you a sample of your backlinks. Yahoo seems to be the most accurate. MSN is usually all over the place (surprise, surprise)

[Mike Empuria]

Altavista (http://www.altavista.com) seems to do the best job for my site. Use linkdomain:yoursite.com -domain:yoursite.com to find the backlinks, excluding the ones on your own pages.

[KLB]

Its interesting how different Altavista is from the other search engines.

[Mike Empuria]

Its interesting how different Altavista is from the other search engines.
Might it have anything to do with the fact AV is an older engine?

[Kyle]

Keep in mind, just because Google doesn't show all your links doesn't mean they aren't aware of them. Google will still assign value to incoming links that do not show up in a link: query.

[KLB]

Might it have anything to do with the fact AV is an older engine?
I doubt AV's age has anything to do with it.
As Icebane pointed out, Google doesn't show all links it knows about. AV may not be hiding the total link count the way Google does.

[Kyle]

Apparently it's something Google are aware of and are doing something to speed it up.

Google used to rank new sites extremely quickly. People with a lot of 'link power' or whatever you wish to call it could push a new site into the top 10 on competitive terms within days. Many of the changes recently with Google's methods of ranking are centered around cutting down on spam. This is where theories like on-topic links and the sandbox delay came from.

MSN is a lot like the old Google from 3 or so years ago, but even easier to rank on (requiring less 'link power' or pagerank or whatever).

[Chris]

Altavista is now Yahoo you know...

[KLB]

Altavista is now Yahoo you know...
I saw that, which begs the question of why AV shows more backlinks than Yahoo?