About a month ago, we reported Google Blog Search Link Command Now Scanning Blogroll Links. In short, using a link:www.seroundtable.com would not only return links from the content of the article, but also return links from the navigational elements. So finding out who linked to you within the body of their content, just got a lot harder.
Vanessa Fox noticed a Google Groups thread where Googler, Jeremy Hylton confirmed this new behavior. But Jeremy also said they will institute a fix so that the link command, while in blog search, won't be returning results found in blogrolls or "exclude the content that isn't really part of the post." Here is Jeremy's post:
We have changed the way we index blog posts to include the full content of the page. We've had occasional complaints about the use of the feed content, particularly the problem with partial feeds that you mentioned. The indexing change has improved the results for a lot of queries, both because we have the full content of the page and because we extract links that are missing from the feeds. The downside of this change is that we see more results that match only the blogroll and other parts of the page that are common to all of a blog's posts.We expected some problems from blogroll matches, but may have underestimated the impact on searches using the link: operator or where the query matches a blog or blogger's name. We do expect to fix the problem you're seeing. We'll use the full page content, but exclude the content that isn't really part of the post. I'm not sure if we'll be able to make the change before the end of the year, but we are working on it and are pretty confident that it can be solved. We'll post an update here when we've got a solution.
So we can hopefully see Google change the behavior early next year. I personally cannot wait!
Forum discussion at Google Groups.
