I have been doing a little research regarding back links and my Paintball blog and I would appreciate your input. There are some inconsistencies and I am a little confused. According to iwebtool's backlink checker, I have 11 back links. However Domain-Pop and Mong's backlink watch say 761 and 613 respectively. I don't expect each tool to be exact, but why are they so different? To add further confusion Submit Express' link popularity tool shows 2369 back links. However, the break down states that I have 0 back links indexed in Google. This is confirmed via Domain-Pop. Why is this? Have I done something wrong? My site is indexed in Google and I am actually receiving a fair amount of traffic. This has really thrown me, I thought I was doing pretty well. Hopefully someone could shed some light on the matter!
Having taken another look at Submit Express' link popularity tool I've come to understand that the tool aggregates data based on the back links that are found to be indexed by a number of different search engines. Namely Google, Yahoo, AllTheWeb, AltaVista, MSN and HotBot / Inktomi. I also understand that this isn't a true estimate of the amount of back links as the total will almost certainly contain links that have been counted at least 3 or 4 times as they are indexed by each different search engine. However, this still doesn't explain why Google is returning 0.
Google doesn't show all of the backlinks they know about, and they only update this ever few months. As for the other inconsistencies, it depends on which search engines they use to get their data, and how they combine it all.
The blog is relatively new so I guess this is the root of my problem. Thanks for clearing that up Cryo.