Google Backlinks Discrepancy

After reading another thread on how to check your backlinks, I thought I would give it a shot.

I did the recommended search of link: mydomain in the Google searchbox which indicated that I had "X" number of links.

Then I followed another poster's advice and looked in webmaster tools to see who was linking to me.

I expected to find more backlinks in webmaster tools, and I did, but I also found that some of the links that popped up from the link: mydomain search were not represented in webmaster tools.

Why is this? Does this mean that some of the links from the initial search no longer count?

 

Hi There,

Google webmasters data is much more reliable than other sources because you have inserted the webmasters code in your website and the data by Google webmasters tools is much more accurate than the Google or there is one more thing that can happen, the number of backlinks could have changed and Google webmasters tool may not have updated its data.

It all about updated data, otherwise both are reliable source of information.

 

Google Webmaster Tools reported backlinks were so sparse that it looked that Google was purposely trying to change the links that were providing the greatest PageRank value being passed on to their site. It is not an exaggeration to indicate that Google Webmaster Tools as a backlink checker historically was so badly as to only be minimally useful.

 

Try to use Google webmaster tool, it will give you better and reliable data.