Broken Back Links
Backlink updates – “link:www.mydomain.com” tool weakened
sometime back in summer 2004 Google corrupted their backlink tool to weaken the SEO community.
Since sites such as blockedpr.com boasted about being able to detect “Non-PR passing sites” via the backlink checks Google did what was obvious to do…
“Hide costly backlinks from PR9,8 and sometimes even PR7 and 6 pages to make them disbelieve in their links value… “
Since that major backlink update in July 2004 – or better a change in the display filter webmasters went crazy about the link:domain tool… believing that their links are worthless, their sites got crippled, etc.
We have aquired a lot of great authority backlinks from PR7 , PR8 and even a PR9 sites – many of them do not show up… it’s obvious, that the higher the value, the less common would a display be – hence the market value would fall and people lose interest in linking…
On site-wide links you see some PR3 , 2, 1 backlinks, but that doesn’t justify the risk of ROS links.
and NO NEW backlink above PR5 were shown in the link:domain tool in the past months… that’s our observation on 10+ client sites.
Google is actually trying to further confuse link traders and customers – customers cannot find the backlinks anymore – and hence cancel their trade contracts… an easy game?
It seems Google’s folks are entrenching themselves and burying algorithm changes deeper… and trying make search engine optimizers and link traders mad… nothing else.