Hey guys, I am a little bit confused here, because when I sign in Google Webmaster Tools and check how many External links my site has, it shows that 3248 links linking to my site (first level) and it shows 4555 total links to the whole site (all levels) but when I check how many site links to me using google search (link:site.ltd) it shows only 376 is it normal? or am I missing something?
Yes, I realized the same thing today. Google knows but does not show its knowledge. In my case link:www.n1q.net does not show the most valuable links though.
The link: query operator is very much outdated than the one in the webmaster tool. Alternatively, you can try using Yahoo-powered Backlink Analyzer to check your most important backlinks
Dear friends google provides many useful webmaster tool in www.google.com/webmaster Easy to learn and implement
I forgot where I read it, but the reason that google does this is that if they showed ALL of your links via the link: command, your competitors could easily use that information and try to get links from all of the sites that link to you, then outrank you. If I knew all the sites that were linking to the #1 competitor in my market, I could attempt to gain links from those same sites.... Therefore, google will only show the TRUE # of inbound links that you have in the google webmaster tools. They do it there because you have to validate that you are actually the owner of the website. Ultimately this is done to protect you and your hard work. As a side note, my google webmaster tools shows more inbound links than does yahoo, which is a surprise to me.
Sounds fair to me... though I'm not sure google did this to protect webmasters. One more thing, assume you are correct which backlinks will be use to calculate our PR, those in link query or the total amount in webmaster tools?