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“Why doesn’t google see my inbound links” is a fantastic question. I wonder why more people don’t ask it. Of course, on the face of it the question seems a bit ambiguous. After all, are people who ask why Google doesn’t see their links concerned with what Google reports in Webmaster Tools or are they looking at the Google link operator? Maybe they are just asking why their links don’t show up in Google search results.

Google has learned to be very picky about both the Websites and links it includes in its index, as they have have been adding aggressive link filtering every year since the Fall 2003 Florida update. At the time, people came to two sets of conclusions about what happened. One group of people wrongly argued that Google had adopted the Hilltop algorithm for its Web search. Other people, including Danny Sullivan, suggested that a more sophisticated algorithm (incorporating filters) had been implemented.

Google VP Marissa Mayer was quoted as advising people to look at “who you linked to and who’s linking to you” … words that have echoed down through the years since then. I recently came across an article about SES Chicago 2003 in which Marissa was quoted as saying that PageRank was not very important to the Google algorithm — that it was only one of a couple hundred factors they used (I cannot find that article, but Barry Schwartz wrote about the same session and reported almost the same thing).

On more than one occasion Todd Friesen has reminded me that Google has been saying the same thing about their ranking factors and bad linking neighborhoods for years. It should seem pretty obvious by now that Google doesn’t like links nearly as much as it once did, and yet people still obsess over links. (Actually, in October I was surprised to see that Sergey Brin said links were only 1% of the algorithm. Shame on me for not paying closer attention!)

Google likes “editorially chosen” links, as those come closest to matching Google’s pipe dream declaration that “links are votes” (except for the links Google doesn’t like). So if you think Google doesn’t see your inbound links, maybe the real question should be, “Does Google not like my inbound links?”

In fact Google doesn’t index every Web document it finds. And the major search engines don’t all index the same documents. Various studies through the years have tried to estimate how much overlap there is between major search engines but no one can really know for sure — not even the major search engines. It’s probably safe to say that Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo! each index about maybe 60% of the Web documents that the others have indexed — and that each search engine indexes many billions more documents than they share with each other.

But the search engines also treat those documents differently. That is, if the “indexed Web” amounts to maybe 100 billion documents, of which maybe 40 billion are indexed in all 3 major search engines, then it follows that the “trusted indexed Web” must consist of fewer than 40 billion documents — perhaps no more than 20-25 billion. If that is the case, then the chances of your finding a value-passing link that all three search indexes include and trust may be no better than 20-25%.

Let me put it another way: the search engines are actively ignoring links on many levels, not just one. They may:

• Choose not to index a document
• Choose to index but not trust a document
• Choose to index and trust a document

Add to that all the documents search engines don’t find and index because they are blocked by robots.txt, “rel=’nofollow’”, or simply linked to from documents that the search engines don’t find, don’t index, or don’t trust.

If you’re asking Google to tell you whether it has indexed your links, you’re wasting your time. If you do a little legwork you can find some of your links in Google’s index.

If you’re asking LinkScape, Yahoo!, Majestic SEO, WebCEO, or some other source whether Google has indexed your links, you’re wasting your time. You cannot use third-party tools to analyze a search engine’s index.

Google may choose not to see your inbound links or it may choose to see them and not tell you it sees them. We as Webmasters don’t have a binding contract with any search engine to report accurately, fairly, and honestly to each other about anything. Search engines hide critical information from Webmasters all the time. Google in particular withholds information from Analytics users (try looking for IP address data, for example), from AdSense users (try asking for page-level detail about click performance), and mere Webmasters (Webmaster Tools won’t tell you which links pass value or which pages are trusted).

I think the real question that is not being asked should be phrased like this: How should I measure the effectiveness of the links I acquire?

And that is the fifty dollar question, isn’t it? I don’t believe there is any way to do this. I’m sure there are many people who think they have found a way to measure link efficacy but no one has yet proven they can really do it — not on a link-by-link level in any way that would benefit commercial SEO link building practices.

Google has once again raised the ante in its war on links by warning people to get spammy links out of their blog comments (and to remove the spammy links they have dropped on blogs if they can). Soon, if not already, Google will be penalizing sites for relying on link dropping in blog comments. This is the Florida update all over again — the only difference being that Google has added one more type of link filter to the long list it employs.

If you’re concerned about why Google doesn’t see your inbound links, maybe you should rethink your linking strategy. Maybe the problem is that Google really does see those links and it doesn’t like them.

And if that’s the case, what are you going to do next?