When is a link a link?

This seems like something that may have been covered already. If so, after 45 mins of searching here, I couldn't find it.

In a nutshell my Google links:www

12/06 27 links
1/07 52
3/28/07 25

Meanwhile webmaster tools lists 523 links.

Any guru wanna chime in with any explanation?

Thanks!

My link counts flux a lot too. Don't worry about the numbers from one month to the next... long term gain is what is important.

Thanks Egol.

But what is the explantion for the 10 fold difference between the links: vs. the webmaster reports from Google?

Only they know how they count the links... so the difference in the numbers have little meaning. The difference that you should look for is improvement in both six months from now.

Google has only reported small fraction of links they know about in their link: queries for years now. Webmaster tools are newer, and my guess (truly nothing but a guess) is that they show more their because it gives people another reason to use them - but they still do not show all links.

As EGOL said though - only Google knows why they do what they do. I would not focus on what they report as your backlinks. use the following query on Yahoo instead:
linksite:yourdomain.com -site:yourdomain.com

Yahoo will return most of the links from other domains to yours. It is still far from an accurate and complete set of data about your backlinks, but it is far more useful than anyting you will get these days from Google. If the number in the query above goes up every month, you will do well in the long run.

I have to disagree. In some cases, I don't think they know why they do what they do.

On a serious note, the Google link: command is just about worthless. It doesn't show my link from a major university homepage, but it shows one for a link farm I somehow got posted on.

Google knows your links are there. They just don't want you to know that they know what they think you don't think they know, but they do.

I'd take it even one step further. I'd say it is worse than worthless. Worthless implies that it simply adds no value. I think Google's link command gives those in the know 0 value AND confuses the heck out of those trying to learn. It is actually a net negative IMHO. They (or more accurately, we) would be better off if it just got turned off and people would learn how to use other tools that might actually give them valuable data.

I believe the 'link:' command is not totally useless but that it requires some knowledge to draw the right conclusions from its output.

I use it to get an idea how the number of backlinks of my pages develops and how it relates to the number of backlinks of competing sites. The numbers themselves are ignored by me.

When 'link:' tells me that site A has 20000 backlinks and site B has 100, then i ONLY infer that site A has considerably more backlinks than B, that's all.

[/QUOTE]Therein lies the danger...
The # of links reported is incorrect and from my experience is random (see first post - links can go up and down in the list when - in reality - they go up and up).
Drawing conclusions from random data is miighty dangerous.

Not necessarily...
I have a site with over 18,000 backlinks; Google shows 53 right now; I have another site with about 1-2,000 backlinks, Google shows 64 right now...
The trouble with sample data is that it it inconsistent; monitoring Googles backlinks count is pointless and dangerous imho as any conclusions drawn are flawed.

Thanks, good to keep that in mind.

Thanks to all.

Sad but understandable that some info from Google is dis-information.

If you register your site with Google's webmaster program you can see very good link counts for your interior pages... organized nicely. Register your site and check it out.

I believe Matt Cutts actually talked about this exact topic in either one of his blogs or a video. He said the reason the link: command only shows a few pages is because showing all the pages would take up much more server resources and is not really worth their time trying to optimize for. I would imagine that as they now know the bigger importance of it they show this in the webmasters area for a lot more targeted group of people that will actually be able to make proper use with the information.

I'm not sure if I'm 100% right on what Cutts was getting at, but this is my interpretation.