According to Google "link:example.com", the most backlinks I get for one of my sites is slightly over 100. God I want to be successful in the link building game and have a thousand backlinks like many of the big players do! So how many backlinks do you have for your sites according to Google?
I have less than a thousand links to my blog homepage, some blog posts have a few hundred links, due to my effort in getting links to each blog post, rather than the blog. That's why the blog PR still remains as PR2, but SERP is better.
WOW! according to link:example.com, I only have 5 backlinks.... LMAO! But, in my Google webmaster tools, I have over 12,000... Weird or NO?
Don't pay too much attention to what google says your backlink count is. They do not reveal all of them in their public search engine. Their webmaster tools is probably more accurate as it is private info
Webmaster tools is definately the best way to see backlinks. On my one gaming niche blog I have posts with over 1,000 backlinks. Amazingly, these are often just normal topics taht had really good content, while my other posts which may have been guest posts or whatnot that I actually tried to advertise did not do anywhere near as well. Just goes to show you that posting good quality content is the best way to get noticed.
It's not quantity that matters, but quality. I checked Yahoo Site Explorer for a competitor and they had 7,500 backlinks. However, when I dug deeper, 5000 of those links were coming from only three sites because they were sitewide links. So it may look like someone has a lot of links in Yahoo Site Explorer when in fact they may just have a few sitewides on a site with lots of indexed pages.
If you get 2,500 backlinks by the query "link:example.com" from Google, that sure is amazing and your site should be earning at least tens of thousands dollars a month.