5 Myths of the operator «Link:» of Google

I found this interesting article in SEOmoz about him Google "link:" operator, this is the famous operator that we can use to see which pages link to our domain or page in particular.

Matt Cutts himself says about it in THIS VIDEO on the operator «link:» which is only a sub-sample of our true backlinks, since before Google did not have so many servers for queries from that operator, over time they increased the amount of backlinks presented when using that operator but it continues being just a small sample.

Google itself tells us that this operator is not an important factor, however several myths arose about it, especially among people who are dedicated to SEO.

Myth #1: The number of backlinks displayed by the "link:" operator is accurate.

Google itself says that this is not the case, this operator is simply a subsample of our links.

We can compare the amount of backlinks we see from a domain using the "link:" operator and then see the amount of backlinks according to Google Webmaster Tools. Unless we have no link to our domain, the difference between the two numbers tends to be abysmal.

Myth #2: This operator only shows the most important backlinks

A long time ago (before 2004) this operator only showed the most important links to our site, nowadays this is no longer the case, both valuable links and links with little or no value are displayed.

Myth #3: Results are in some sort of order

Nothing indicates that the results produced by this operator are in any order of relevance or any other.

Myth #4: The operator returns a representative count of our links

The "link:" operator cannot be used as a reliable metric, as the number of backlinks it shows has no proportion to our actual backlinks.

Myth #5: The backlinks displayed by this operator are up to date

The results for "link:" are updated infrequently and inconsistently, according to SEOmoz it usually coincides with Pagerank updates, so on the next Pagerank change I will check if it is true.

Google and Matt Cutts already said that we should not pay much attention to this operator, but what I do not know is why it continues to exist if they deny that it has any utility to make a good estimate of the links that point to our site, maybe that's just I answered it on time.