Hello, I am a little confused about the number of backlinks that Google says I have. When I run a "links:" in Google it says I have 78 links, in Analytics/webmaster tools "Pages with external links" says I have 591 links, which is correct and why the difference? Thanks in advance
Have never heard such a theory! Google hides most of your links - the ones that are visible seems to be selected randomly...
That is not true, it's an old fallacy from the time Google showed backlinks of sites with PR>4. What Google shows and what it counts are not the same. Today, Google is on record stating that they only show a sample of links in the link: command. What you see in the Webmaster Tools panel is more accurate, but still only partial. For a fuller acccount of your backlinks, use the Yahoo linkomain: operator.
It's still true that the link: operator shows the *number* of high quality links and that has traditionally meant a PageRank score of 4 or higher. But about 3-4 years ago now, they changed it so that the pages shown in the results are no longer the sources of those high-quality links. This is why you'll still see a higher link count shown on stronger sites. If you want a more comprehensive list of links, then use Yahoo! Site Explorer or the Google Webmaster Tools Console. Just keep in mind that both of them show links that are not necessarily counted for ranking purposes.
If you put a space after any of the special operators like site: or link:, Google treats it as a normal search so you'll end up with misleading information.
As in Webmasters tools as well ( external links) , Google never , repeat never shows you the whole picture. Much trickier animal than most people think.
I will not debate this if others do no provide evidence, I read the PR4 somewhere very recently. Until I see it again feast on this: Make sure that other sites link to yours Links help our crawlers find your site and can give your site greater visibility in our search results. When returning results for a search, Google combines PageRank (our view of a page's importance) with sophisticated text-matching techniques to display pages that are both important and relevant to each search. Google counts the number of votes a page receives as part of its PageRank assessment, interpreting a link from page A to page B as a vote by page A for page B. Votes cast by pages that are themselves "important" weigh more heavily and help to make other pages "important."
the yahoo way is the best way...make sure you choose Show Inlinks except from this domain......to show only external links
I tried http://www.backlinkwatch.com once and was impressed to see the number of backlinks that shows up.
Google does not show all back links in backward links. If you need to check all back links then have to use webmaster tool