Hi, My Question is, Why their will be difference in the Number of Back links for a website when we check the back links as the following ways 1) link:www.eample.com 2) If use any back link checker tool Thanks in Advance
software tools can give wrong results due many varied reasons but if you directly check with the link: command, that would always provide you with correct numbers.
Google has limited the functionality of the link: operator to prevent you competitors from spying on your backlinks and reverse engineering them. You will get a better idea checking your backlinks in the webmaster tools.
google tool bar and manually way is best because whenever you check by software then not gives right answers...so my opinion whenever will you check then use this link:www.abc.com
Using the link: command provides a limited listing in all of the search engines. Yahoo SiteExplorer will show the most and Google Webmaster Tools is one of the most accurate. For the best results, I'd suggest using Majestic SEO. The reason you get varied results is because all three of the search engines have very different indexes and often display different results based on the datacenter you hit. Since most backlink checking tools use a variety of sources such as Google and Yahoo, you can't expect the results to ever be 100% accurate.
Ok, all of you who thinks manual link checking is better, let's take a closer look at it. Manually searching for links using the link: operator doesn't guartantee accurate results for a number of reasons. 1. You get the list of indexed links which doesn't equal actual links. The site may have removed the link or the page where the link used to sit, but search engine doesn't know it until the crawler visits the page again. 2. Search engines have a limit of 1,000 links so you get just a fraction of links. 3. There are no-follow links which don't pass the link juice, but you can't tell them until you check it. And if you use a backlink checker (I'm using SEO SpyGlass so let's see how it differs) The tool does pretty much the same - goes to the search engines and types in link:domain.com to get a list of links. But 1. Then it visits each page and checks whether the link is still there and whether it's dofollow or no-follow. 2. I can search for links in a hell lot of search engines and get more links. 3. The tool uses advanced link operators such as link:domain.com -site:linkingsite.com to get more links. Thus I can easily get a list of 6,000 to 15,000 links (depending on the size of the site's linking profile) while you only get a 1k with manual search. 4. I get a whole buch of info on each backlink - Google PR of the domain and page, the number of links on the page, link value, anchor text, the country, etc. and at the end of the day what do we have? You spend more time searching manully, then copying and pasting and you get 1k links a great deal of which are nofollow or missing and you don't know it. And I get a list of 6k+ links with a lot of data for analysis. I know which links are nofollow, which ones are dofollow I know how much PR each link passes, and much more. So who's got "more accurate data" P.S. No offence meantm it's just that I'm fed up with this "manual SEO - best SEO" thing. You probably heard someone with a reputation in SEO say that in regard to some shady automatic link-exchange scheme and now you think that using any tool or software for SEO is black-hat and Google will ban you and bla-bla-bla. Come on catch up with the time!