Question regarding no. of Backlinks

I am a newbie in SEO, have recently created a blog, and there is something that kept me from sleeping well last night. I hope someone can help me with some advice.
I checked the no. of backlinks with Google Webmaster Tools (to my site), which was updated yesterday, and it showed about 1150, while with Yahoo Tools, I got about 2780 backlinks, why is the difference so big?
However, what I'm more worried about is another aspect: when I look at the first 1000 backlinks from Yahoo, almost all of them originate from a single site (www.somerandomsite.com/..), is that normal? Because it seems particularly strange to me.

Oh, and does anybody know how often Yahoo updates the backlinks? I see almost everyday some minor changes happening, but they're so small that I can't believe they've updated; for example I've done some social networking (or how it's called), and got several hundreds backlinks from sites like alexa/whois and so on, but the no. of backlinks only increased by a few.. why is that?

I know I've asked quite a lot of questions, and I apologize, but as I said I'm a beginner in this field and I'm quite uncertain whether it will all work out through hard work, cause experience I don't really have.

Thanks a lot and I look forward to some replies.

 

Basically Google or Yahoo dont give too much away when displaying you links pointing to your site. If we saw too much of what was going on in the background then it offers more openings for manipulation. The sitewide links your seeing on www.somerandomsite.com/ is 'apparently' what Yahoo thinks is the most relevant domain/pages pointing to your site. To me its just another way for them to fill up the 1000 links your allowed to see.

 

linkwatcher is bang on. The only true way you could get the actual number of links is by crawling the entire web yourself and analysing every link.
This would demand massive bandwidth, huge amounts of processing power and a giant database. And some clever regular expressions.

This just isn't feasible, although a lot of people/companies are trying . Both SEOMoz and MajesticSEO have built their own databases.

Also, about some links showing up and others now. It's usually down to how often yahoo/google spider the site that contains the backlink. If I get a backlink from a powerful domain with a lot of authority, I find it shows up almost immediately... if I get a backlink from some crappy chinese domain with no unique content, poor links etc. I will usually never see it turn up on things like site explorer.

 

The difference in the number can simply come down to the last time the spiders were crawling. With my own stuff, I've noticed that Google seems to crawl more frequently than Yahoo (with Yahoo usually about a day behind).

As for alot of your links coming from one site, is it a site that you regularly contribute to? For example, I have a ton of backlinks from the forums I post on because every post counts as another backlink.

 

No, I only posted about 2 comments on that site, that was all..

 

Well this depends. Google obviously has a number of different bots operating at different crawl rates. Factored by individual bot sitemaps and site layout.

Yes Google seems to be more sensitive to crawling more regulary but other factors even down to coding determine overall crawl rate.

This doesnt necessarily mean Google or Yahoo will show it as a page/domain thats linking to your site.

 

Thank you very much for your replies, I kind of understand how it works now..

I know it sounds stupid, but how many backlinks does one need for his page to be ranked 1 (I mean PR1). I know it depends a lot on the links and if they have anything to do with my niche, but I am interested in an average number, so that I know how much more I have to work to see some results..

 

Yahoo shows a lot more links than Google. Google even says that they don't show all backlinks.

Make sure sure you're selecting "Exclude this domain" and "to all URLs in domain" in yahoo. That will ensure that you're looking at all links which are coming from other sites excluding your internal links and that the links are going to all pages in your site.

Remember that it's not just the number of links but also their quality (PR) that matters. Also, if that website is on a similar topic to yours, that will help out your SEO.

 

You shouldn't get caught into thinking PR actually matters, it really doesn't. I have sites that are PR0 ranking for terms that my PR4 sites can't touch - the only people who value it are the link sellers/buyers. Besides, googles internal pagerank is different from their toolbar pagerank.

Take a look at: http://www.webworkshop.net/pagerank.html

As for how to get a PR1. It depends on the pagerank of the pages you are getting the links from, if they are PR1 links - you will need 18. If they are PR2, you will need 4.

 

Wow, thanks for the article, I'm currently reading it and it's very helpful.

 

well i think seo better then this all............... easy and cheapest way is seo.

 

there are no real accurate backlink checker. get an account with google webmaster central and the equivalent with yahoo. yahoo shows more than google does.

also i wouldn't worry about how many are showing. just focus on building quality as well as your onsite optimization and content.

as for pagerank goes, google updates it once every 3-4 months.

 

While it's good to track your backlinks to some extent, more importantly is to not "watch your work" and keep building. If you ping the links as soon as you create them it will look very spammy. Build thousands, and let the SE's find them naturally, or build link wheels around them to ensure proper indexation.

 

Sorry for asking, but what are "link wheels"?

 

@ flightcenter ... What's a "link wheel"? Thanks

 

Yahoo updates the number of backlinks almost everyday but only once it caches the site where you link is. Google updates every so often and only shows the links they think of as important, its alittle delayed also.

 

. It will become bigger. LOL. Yahoo counts NoFollow and DoFollow links as your backlink, while Google is strict on counting backlinks and only look to count DoFollow links. But backlinks is not important, Google weighs your linking pattern more than your backlink count.

 

Google count every link they find - even nofollow links. The nofollowed links just don't carry any weight.
Backlinks are very important and what do you mean your 'linking pattern' is more important?

 

How do I know if a link is nofollow? So that I don't waste my time posting on different sites..

 

The difference in the number of links between yahoo and google, is that google doesn't count links with the rel="nofollow" attribute in it. Whereas yahoo does.