Big Change at Google?

HMTKSteve

Google changes "link:" results

While I was on lunch today I was working on a blog article about Google Page Rank when I discovered something very strange.

Google has removed all links from social bookmarking sites when you do a "link:www.example.com" style of web search.

Does anyone else know anything about this?

EsonLinji

They don't count links in comments in blogs hosted on Blogger. Blogger is set up so that Google search doesn't follow those links. they do this to prevent spammers getting an advantage to their page rank by putting links to their stuff in every one's comments pages. I don't know if they do this with other blogging sites (Google owns Blogger, and this is set up on the Blogger end), but the same motivation is still present.

HMTKSteve

In the past links from Stumbleupon and Digg would show up in a link:xxx search.

Apreche

It's old news. I bet it's just a side effect of more people using rel="nofollow"

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2005/01/preventing-comment-spam.html

HMTKSteve

I'm not so sure about that Apreche,

I've checked the source code on some Digg profile pages (which used to show up in "link:" search) and they do not have the rel="nofollow" tag.

I think Google just scrubbed these sites from their database in regards to "link:" searches.