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SEO Best Practice: Index Inclusion
The SEO Best Practice: Index Inclusion Guide is part of Econsultancy's renowned SEO Best Practice Guide and is has been created with the help and frontline insight of globally-esteemed SEO practitioners, in order to give you the edge in your natural search marketing activity.
Head of Digital Marketing at Future Publishing
26 January 2007 17:08pm
Hi gurus!
Does anyone know the difference between the way Google counts its in bound links with the link: command and Yahoo's Site Explorer tool? There are VAST differences between the two, I just wondered if anyone knew why?
E-Business Consultant at Dan Barker
26 January 2007 17:22pm
hi, Justine,
google only shows a very small portion of the links it knows about, the reason being they want to try & prevent people from 'reverse engineering' search rankings too much.
daniel
Head Of E-Commerce at JWI Ltd
27 January 2007 11:18am
You may also find if you follow the links in Yahoo! you cannot actually see any inbound links on the page. This, in my experience, seems to be because Yahoo! sometimes follows PPC links on the content network.
Use both tools since the links Google shows is an indication of what it wants you to see, whereas Yahoo! gives a much broader idea of your backlinks. In reality the actual figure is probably somewhere in between. Look at the ones which appear in Google and try to develop similar links.
For instance I have never seen Google show a backlink for us from any form of site which can be edited by a human (E.G a WiKi or a forum) however both of these types of links give us traffic and appear in a Yahoo! link: search.
Managing Director at Shine Marketing
30 January 2007 14:46pm
It's worth looking at the links in MSN also. Their numbers and Yahoo's are much more consistent, and clearly show more than Google is letting on about.
Don't forget to discount the links within the site as opposed to links from external domains, whilst they count a tiny bit you can pretty much remove them from the equation.
Head of Digital Marketing at Future Publishing
30 January 2007 17:35pm
Thanks everyone!
On 14:46:47 30 January 2007 StevePratley wrote:
Head of Marketing at moneysavingexpert.com
07 February 2007 16:13pm
Google Webmaster tools now has a links tab, which will tell you exactly how many inbound links you have, however it will not tell you which are important and which are providing the most "juice" see www.mattcutts.com/blog for more info.