Discrepancy in backlink statistics

One of the ways in which you might get a suggestion of the popularity of a site is by checking what is called backlinks. As the name suggests a backlink or an imbound link is a link to your site from another site. Backlinks are an important part of the search engine optimisation process as they are used by search engines to look at the importance of your site. The thinking here is that sites with more links towards it will be of more relevance than sites with no links.

Note that it is not just the number of backlinks that you have, but also their quality. Hundreds of links from low page rank sites will act like one link from a page with high page rank. You can check your backlinks this through just about any search engine using the command "link:www.yourwebsite.com". This will show you a list of the websites that contain a link to the searched website.

However, there seems to be a major discrepancy between different search engines. When checking the backlinks to our own site the different search engines different by an enormous amount.

Google = 314
Alexa = 362
MSN = 8,715
Yahoo = 13,651
AllTheWeb = more than 10,000
Altavista = more than 10,000

So if any of this data useful or worth trusting? I think it depends on what search engine you look at. Yahoo, AllTheWeb and Altavitsa display all of the links, no matter where they are from, so for this type of search they don’t look at the quality of the link. Google and Alexa display links from quality sites. So for an accurate picture of how your site is linked to externally I would use Yahoo. However, from a search engine optimisation point of view it might be more beneficial if you only look at the Google backlinks as this would give you a better idea of how users might be brought to your site (i.e. through quality web sites).

Phil Norton
SEO Engineer

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