Google vs Yahoo! backlinks

[Dani]

Typing link:site.com into Yahoo! shows me a huge amount of backlinks from a wide variety of domains. Typing link:site.com into Google shows me a very small selection of backlinks, most from just a handful of domains (no idea why). Now I know that Google backlinks spit out completely old data that is just a "sampling" of the links Google knows about. But what are the chances that Google actually knows about / counts all of the links that Yahoo does? My reason for asking is that Google sends me a LOT of traffic and Yahoo sends me absolutely no traffic (Less than 1% of what Google does).

Is it possible to get a decent amount of traffic from Yahoo? Everything points to them thinking that my site is completely worthwhile, I do a lot of on and off page SEO, and yet traffic from them is really pitiful.

[redZERO]

The chances of google having all your links is very possible

[Dani]

Do you think the incoming links in Google Webmaster Tools is entirely accurate?

[ithelp]

Typing link:site.com into Yahoo! shows me a huge amount of backlinks from a wide variety of domains. Typing link:site.com into Google shows me a very small selection of backlinks, most from just a handful of domains (no idea why). Now I know that Google backlinks spit out completely old data that is just a "sampling" of the links Google knows about. But what are the chances that Google actually knows about / counts all of the links that Yahoo does? My reason for asking is that Google sends me a LOT of traffic and Yahoo sends me absolutely no traffic (Less than 1% of what Google does).

Is it possible to get a decent amount of traffic from Yahoo? Everything points to them thinking that my site is completely worthwhile, I do a lot of on and off page SEO, and yet traffic from them is really pitiful.

Google does not show all links , it is good for a webmaster , otherwise competitor for the same keywords can buy/beg links from all webpages that link to a website.
From my experience I have found techies use mostly google to search for stuff, so even if you rank well in yahoo for some technical keywords, no body searches them in yahoo.

[jewboy]

It's probably unanimous within the SEO community that a link command on Google is broken. We find that Yahoo reports "better" accuracy with regards to backlink count.

Regarding your question of the 1%, that is unusually low. Nielsen just came out with new figures yesterday regarding SE market share:

Google Inc. (GOOG) topped November U.S. Internet searches with 4.25 billion searches, a 58% market share, according to Nielson Co.'s Nielson Online.

Yahoo! Inc. (YHOO) ranked second with 1.32 billion searches, an 18% market share.

Microsoft Corp.'s (MSFT) MSN/Windows Live Search was third with 880,550 searches, or a 12% share, and Time Warner Inc.'s (TWX) AOL rounded out the top four with 332,385 searches, or a 4.5% share

Given that Yahoo has almost 20% of the search pie, they should be giving you more than 1%.

Looking at the data from one of my large sites that gets over 1.5 million monthly unique visitors - Neilsen's numbers are not far off the mark.

Rebecca from SEOmoz has an interesting article on topic that you might find interesting and relevant to ytour question.

[ericfromandys]

I am in the same boat, although not as extreme. For me, I simply can't seem to rank well in Yahoo, so that explains it for me. Do you come up with the same organic rankings for your main keyword terms in Yahoo as you do in Google?

[darsh999]

as all of you know that google is having a very large database than yahoo and microsoft and aol dont even stand against it .
the top searches also claims that google is far far better than yahoo but this question will be raised many number of times in the future as well and the links are more accurate than yahoo