link popularity GOOGLE vs YAHOO
 

Whenever I check out link popularity of my domain and other domains (for comparison) with an online tool, Google and Yahoo show absolutely different results.

If a domain has like 20,000 links on Yahoo, it's generally gonna have round about 100-300 on Google.
I definitely understand that it's the difference in calculation method.

But what's the difference? Who knows?

Google intentionally doesn't display all results. There is no clear way to compare.

Alex

Thanks. Now I know that Google is a nice buddy who doesn't want us to know his way of calculation.

Here's the answer from Google themselves:


"Google doesn't return all backlinks in response to a link: command. In the ancient days, it was because there was a finite amount of storage space on the machines that served link: requests. So we only kept the backlinks for the top N pages. Later as we moved to a different indexing system, we kept backlinks for the top M% of pages. This was helpful for important pages, but it meant that Mom and Pop sites with lower PageRank wouldn't have as good a chance to see their backlinks.
At SES London, DaveN had a suggestion. He said: why don't you give all pages an equal chance of seeing backlinks? That's good for users, who will have a greater chance of seeing backlinks for a given page, and it's especially good for smaller websites--they'd have a chance to see backlinks. It seemed like a good idea, so we implemented it. In fact, in order to give each page a better chance of seeing backlinks (instead of just the top M% of pages), we doubled the amount of backlinks that Google exports to the outside world. So users now have access to twice as much link: data as before; it's just not all the top PageRank pages.

... and ...

Given the large amount of data involved, and the fact that remarkably few people use the link: command, we don't show all backlinks externally, but we can access them internally."


Hope that helps :)

OK. So now it's kinda clear