anyone have an opinion on the best way to get a baseline of how many pages are linking to you? I am preparing to roll out several link building phases and I want to measure the impact. I have read that Yahoo site search is a good tool. Does that tell you ho wmany google has indexed? I always thought using link:http://www.mysite.com in google, yahoo, msn would give me some idication of link popularity as well as my competitors. Recently I have read that google does not giev you the full picture. True?
do I need to upload the validator to see the results for google and MSN? the search.yahoo.com results are for yahoo index only correct?
You can use Google Webmasters Central to view all your registered backlinks with Google. http://www.google.com/webmasters/start
ya I am registered on there. I just read a few posts from poeple saying google holds things back and yahoo gives you a clearer picture of your sites link popularity on google. not sure if this is true or not.
Again, the link: search operator does not provide all registered backlinks from a site on Google, but internally with Google Webmasters Central you can view all your external links, I've yet to see one I knew should be there not appear, remember external links aren't updated real-time, there is a delay in information. Not sure where you read they hold back, but that mis-information train is blowing it's horn loud.
ok maybe I am missing something but I was playing around with a link popularity tool popuri.us and it has a ton less links into my website int he google index. Almost 19,000 less. What gives? I suppose it is just pinging google with site:mysite.com but why is that so different?
Google webmaster tools with tell you detail about what going on inside your site but still only google analytic that can indicate your link building effort missed or cached
yeah, google doesn't display all the backlinks, they only give the random sample to avoid competitors spying on other sites.