Why does Yahoo count so many more backlinks than Google?

[archard]

Yahoo says I have over 15,000 backlinks whereas Google says I have 332. What's the deal here?

[ly2]

Yahoo says I have over 15,000 backlinks whereas Google says I have 332. What's the deal here?

It's always like that. I think Google only counts the best of the best as a backlink. They probably leave junk links like the ones in sigs and profiles out of their number.

[sakib000]

If you site have 100 links from forums.digitalpoint.com google will count it one cause it is one site, but yahoo will count it 100.

[senloong]

Yahoo will count on every link while Google only on quality site links. I like Yahoo because it updates backlinks much faster than Google.

[Le GoogelGuRu]

Yeah, Google has like 20 backlinks for my site and Yahoo has over 2000.

[CReed]

Just because Google does not list all the backlinks doesn't mean they don't know about them.

[mototips]

If you use google sitemaps it will show you all your backlinks. www.google.com/sitemaps/

[artistlyrics]

Google's selection process is more rigorous than Yahoo for backlinks.

[guia]

I agree with you yahoo backlinks updates much faster than google. Google is strict in evaluating the quality of links.

Yahoo will count on every link while Google only on quality site links. I like Yahoo because it updates backlinks much faster than Google.

[Janna122003]

Yahoo says I have over 15,000 backlinks whereas Google says I have 332. What's the deal here?

Google only display quality links but if you have an account in google webmaster tool you can see many backlinks in google.

[imi_99]

I think both used their own strategy.

[Smaaz]

yahoo also counts links that contain rel="nofollow" as backlinks while google dosn't

[Comenius]

I've never understood this.

Seems like Google doesn't want to reveal everything, perhaps in hopes of making it harder to game their results.

[exponent]

Google and Yahoo crawlers view different pages. Yahoo may have some indexed sites that Google has left in the "dark web" and thus will show more backlinks.

[tradeya]

they might wanna make your site look good :D this way will encourage people to use their services more.

mainly just they dont want to show the same or similar no. with google so they try to make a different. they might thought that ok google count only the urls, but i will count them all! :rolleyes:

[quirkyericia]

i dunno...i checked the links back to my site on google sitemap and many of them weirdly come from MFA porn sites...:(

[PioneerGold]

It's always like that. I think Google only counts the best of the best as a backlink. They probably leave junk links like the ones in sigs and profiles out of their number.

Google is not some pristine goddess who does no wrong!

Using their webmaster tools, I have seen all kinds of manufactured links listed.

These are links only created for the purpose of increasing link count.

[Forsh]

Probably one of the reasons that Google gives better results.

[Richie_Ni]

Google only shows a sample of your backlinks.

[stallions]

Google don't show all links.

[triper]

Yes, yahoo have faster update for backlinks. Google dont show all links, try compare results from yahoo and google.

[lukejea]

I have two websites..I put my link for my new website on my old one..yahoo picked it up in just one day. Its been 4 weeks now and google still does not see it.

[Trakker]

So many half answers here...

The "link:www.example.com" command in google only shows a small selection of links they know of

In Google Webmaster tools they now show all the links they know about, but you can't tell which are "nofollow" or discounted for other reasons.

I believe this tool - http://www.webmasterlogs.com/link-analysis-tool/backlinks.html
shows all domains that google counts as linking to a site - not sure how though.

the "linkdomain:www.example.com" in Yahoo seems to show all links they know about. Is a pain when you have sitewide links and they show 100s of links from one site, so it is hard to see how many domains link to your site.

Does anyone know a good tool for aggregating all the links Yahoo counts (counting a domain only 1 time) ?

[rzvagelsky]

Google only display quality links but if you have an account in google webmaster tool you can see many backlinks in google.

Quality...No. They only show a sample of your links and nobody can tell you for sure (except Google) why they choose to show the links they do. If the links being displayed on Google were indicative of how well my link campaign was going...then I would be in some serious trouble.

[zaaylo]

Yahoo will count on every link while Google only on quality site links. I like Yahoo because it updates backlinks much faster than Google.
I agree with you.
One of my site is on 1st pg of Yahoo and there is no address with Google.
I dont know why it is so! :(

-zaaylo

[maari]

It's always like that.

[MN Sandy]

Yahoo shows all links, also I think it counts 'nofollow' tags;

Google shows 1-5% of links, for sake to provenet SEO guys from reverse ingeneering;

[Volvospeed]

http://www.smartpagerank.com/result.php?domain=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.volvospeed.com

According to that and several other sources including sitemaps I have almost 85K yahoo backlinks and 0 from google. I have learned to ignore pretty much any stat google gives me,

[Myst]

Google only shows random links to your website

[luke999]

Yeah i'm the same. yahoo shows me as having way more links. i thought i ws doing something wrong at first when i just kept checking google for back links and got discouraged then i checked on yahoo and found it indexed way more.

its true that googles webmaster tools shows more of the backlinks they have but i think it doesn't show all of them. i think maybe they want to only show quality links to try and discourage people from getting whatever links they can regardless of quality.

[Kapil Khaneja]

Google is lot more choosy than yahoo :) yahoo is much flexible.

[energy.fs]

both search engine's bots are diff. from each other ...when they crawling website ... they gets links from websites ...and creates database ..... on internet there are billions of webpages ....suppost if google crawls 2000 website ... it is not necessary that yahoo also crawls 2000 .... it cralws more or fewer then google .. this diff. is imp for backlinks ....

[MOG]

Google is picking up these backlinks, they are just a lot more private about what they publish...

...within the google webmaster tools the number of links to a given page is roughly the same as yahoo are picking up.

Also, try searching for the total google links "under consideration"

[Kapil Khaneja]

Incase we have many links from a single source google counts it as 1 link while yahoo and other engines show it as many links. There lies the difference. I have around 200 links as per yahoo but still not a single one from google. :)

[MOG]

Incase we have many links from a single source google counts it as 1 link while yahoo and other engines show it as many links. There lies the difference. I have around 200 links as per yahoo but still not a single one from google. :)

sorry thats wrong, google just dont publish the data... here is a good example, check my site:

www.hostedwith.us (about 6 weeks old now)

yahoo read around 5,000 links,
google reads PUBLICLY 0 links :eek:
google WEBMASTER tools (private) reads 11,000 links.

The information that google PUBLISH is nowhere near what they actually know about.

also, check out matt cutts latest video interview at pubcon where he discusses that googles new algorithm can detect paid links and removes them from their private count :eek: :eek:

[palghat]

Google is very selective in backlinks.
I have 5 backlinks from Google and 390 backlinks from Yahoo for the same site.

[dairyman]

Google takes just 1% of all the links indexed by the yahoo. Depending upon the number of yahoo backlinks, you can roughly arrive at the google backlinks by dividing it by 100.

[mamame123456]

believe Google...They are best

[abhishekdaaga]

Yahoo takes each & every link it crawls.. also say from same url there 3 10 links then Y! takes ALL Google just take ONE :) this is main difference

[khakicom]

yahoo are losing the competition so dont concentrate much on them....Google is still leading !

[sprabhu]

Its true . Yahoo shows more backlinks as compare to google as google onlly count quality links and yahoo each and every.

[angilina]

If you site have 100 links from forums.digitalpoint.com google will count it one cause it is one site, but yahoo will count it 100.

is this true? I am saying because I see a list of many links from the same site in webmaster tools.

[MOG]

is this true? I am saying because I see a list of many links from the same site in webmaster tools.

yeah, what the other post said is rubbish... google count it as multiple links as well, the guy doesnt know what he is talking about....

there are a lot of people that just post rubbish for the sake of making a post...

[mor]

guess they all have there way of doing things