Inbound links are very important for websites. They have a huge influence on the pagerank from Google and therefore on the position of your website in the resultpages of the searchengine. The way to get the amount of inbound links is for me the search option on Google with:
link:www.mydomain.xyz (whatever your domain looks like).
As a result you get the amount and a list of websites, which are linking to your site. The problem I have all the time with this list: the most links to my sites I definitly know about weren’t in the resultlist and I allways have the feeling, that the value is too low. By the way, the value Google provides to the public for the inbound links is known to be very vague.
On Alexa.com you have the same function. I check this from time to time for different sites as well, but the values never changed over more than a year now. I believe, that the function on Alexa.com isn’t working at all.
But today I tried the search for inbound links via Yahoo and i was very surprised: the values a are much higher as the value from Google. But it’s not the only the value, what’s far more important for me is, that I found in the resultpages all of the links from other websites i know. It’s hard to say which value is in the end the corrrect one (or the most correct one), but my feeling tends more to Yahoo. You search on Yahoo with:
linkdomain:www.mydomain.xyz -www.mydomain.xyz
Does anybody has a different approach for measuring inbound links?
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I also discovered this problem with the Google Link: operator when i was reading someone’s blog on the subject yesterday. It’s annoying as i’ve been trusting it until recently!
Apparently it provides only a ‘selection’ of inbound links. Use Google Webmaster Tools for a more accurate measure (you have to validate your website on there first). Apart from that i’ve just been using Yahoo like you have. Think those are the best two tools.