Someone told me that typing this into google is not a good way to check backlinks: links: yourwebsite.com Is Yahoo really the best way to count backlinks? Is the syntax the same as for google?
Well, if you want to what backlinks Google considers to be true inbound links you need a Google Webmasters Central Account, you can look at external incoming links in their and download an excel sheet of all of them. To my knowledge it displays all inbound links it acknowledges. www.google.com/webmasters
Ok you're right, the backlink count report by Google Webmaster is much different that typing in "links: ". But then whats the best way to compare your backlink strength against other sites?
Im also interested in that, if anyone has a tool for it. Sometimes ive used tools for various things in the past and then forget where i found them.
Bad news, The closest accurate method\tool you could use is to actually crawl the internet to see what backlinks exist, which is not only impractical, would also not show which of those backlinks the search engines acknowledge. Your best bet is to compare the visable results of the major search engines which are Google, Yahoo! & MSN. The is no true way to see behind the scenes like via Webmasters central. I usually use the visable links in the link: operator on Google and the links listed via Yahoo, this is the best method. Nothing is done right the easy way, you must always work to get the results you want.