Why does google not recognize inbound links from bbb.org?

[coleda]

After using site explorer I noticed my companys links for bbb.org are not included.  They are for our competitors but not us.  Anyone know why?

Thanks,

Cole

[KeriMorgret]

Thanks Corey, that's the perfect answer. We don't crawl all the web, which is sometimes why we don't see the really deep links. We're only at 100 people, so don't have quite the server farms that Google or Bing do for crawling.

[CoreyNorthcutt]

I think the real issue here is that crawling the entire Internet is hard work, no one does it perfectly.  Not SEOmoz, not even Google.  OSE crawls independent of Google, so the two won't be related.  It's possible that SEOmoz will find it yet.  It's more likely that Google has already found it (they definitely have more resources).

You can see if Google does know about the page by searching "site:bbb.org (your company)".  It may also appear in Google Webmaster Tools, although like any backlink data provider, I'd take that with a huge grain of salt.  I see major links appearing in GWT from 5-10 years back as "new links" all the time.  It doesn't take too much analysis to realize that this doesn't 100% jive with the data that Google's organic search results are using.

[dmccarthy]

What's nothing to do with google. It's an open site explorer issue. A simple check of the page source on bbb will determine if google will count it as a link.