Okay How do you find out how many backlinks your site actually has at any time? For instance a site of mine has 4000 backlinks with yahoo 72 with Google I know a lot of my backlinks are not very good as i have a link on a games site with about a kabillion pr0 pages. Anyhow im now building up decent related links and more social bookmarking and article links. So im looking for where to find up to date (or as close as) information? Is it that google doesnt update the links as fast and thats why there is so few or what?
aha! well it shows that i have just over 1000 in there. does this only update in link:www.domain.com when the PR update comes?
Actually Live Webmaster Center provided me a more accurate backlink check then Yahoo or Google. But it did not tell which backlinks were going to which pages. Google only provides a sample of backlinks. Maybe this is so you can't duplicate your competition and post a link on the same sites they have. My suggestion is to stay away from sitewide links. I believe that Google may think these are paid and devalue them to nothing. Better to have your links on the homepage and displayed somewhere other then the footer.
webmaster tools is always updating the backlinks, but the link:site.com wont show all the links that you'll see in google web tools.
okay thanks for that guys. i hadnt really used the webmaster tools apart from sitemaps and for some reason i thought that they used the same link:etc as the search engine does. So if the site:etc doesnt show all the backlinks then what is the best way to find out how many backlinks a competitor has?
yeah its definitely great tool, has many useful features, i thought i had not discovered the backlink feature yet
Here is a cool link to find out about your backlinks and more. http://www.earnersforum.com/tools/keywords/
I haven't used google webtools yet, but I guess if you wanted an accurate count of backlinks checked in my google, this would be the tool for that.