My competitors high Google (only) ranking - authority backlinks?

[internetheaven]

One competitor's website ranks in the top 3 for nearly every competitive search term on Google in my industry. But if you search for the same terms on Yahoo or MSN the rest of us are still there in the top 10 but this particular competitor generally isn't even in the top 30 anymore.

1. My conclusion is that this competitor has obtained 1 or more authority/trusted backlinks to their site and that is why they are jumping the queue on Google.

2. As the results on Yahoo/MSN are almost the same as the results on Google except for a couple of firms I am assuming that Yahoo/MSN pay less attention to the authority/trust of a linking site.

I like to hear opinions on both concepts
Thanks
Mike

[tedster]

1. Always a good possibility. There may also be another domain that is 301 redirected and it is THAT domain that has the backlink strength.

2. Yes, Google's algo does more with links than the other two major engines. That's one reason why they only share a sample of their link data through the link: operator. Even within a Webmaster Tools account, the site owner does not see a full list, although it's usually a lot bigger than with the link: operator.

[internetheaven]

Even within a Webmaster Tools account, the site owner does not see a full list

Really? I'd never heard this before. Is this actually mentioned in the webmaster tools info sections?

[tedster]

It's only inside the Webmaster Tools by omission: "This table provides a list of pages on http://www.example.com/ that have links pointing to them from other sites" and "This page lists sites we've found with links to yours."

It never says "all the sites" or "all the pages". However, notice this wording, from the Google Blog announcement:

Now you can use webmaster tools to view a much larger sample of links to pages on your site that we found on the web.

[googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com...]

Plus, close watching of a site with a whole lot of backlinks makes it clear that it's not a complete list.