Links seen on different search engines

What does this mean

[JamaicanFood]

Hello, I used a search engine popularity checker to find out how many links one of my competitors had.

It returned the number of backward links for that competitor on all the major search engines i.e All The Web (10,000) Google (500) and Yahoo (10,000) among others.

But this is what confuses me in determining link popularity (or to derive Google Page Rank) does the google spider only crawl and note the links in their search engine or does it take into account all the other search engines.

This means that to rank close to my major competitor in a google search for a particular keyword I would only need approximately 600 backward (in addition to all the other SEO aspects) links on google. If this is true then let me know.

I think google has over 70% of the the search engine market and that would be where I would focus on.

Little Help Here.
JamaicanFood

[jtbell]

Google's "link:" search displays only a small fraction of the links that Google actually knows about and uses in its PageRank calculations.

[DerekH]

Or to spell it out more forcefully, Google probably has 10,000 links in its database too, but you're not going to see them in case Webmasters can deduce something from the order in which it presents them!
DerekH

[JamaicanFood]

So what exactly does that mean..? Is it that I will actually never know how many links that either I or a competitor has in Google, and...

If thats the case do these popularity checkers duplicate links then.. and these figures are actually not accurate.

[BigDave]

Google also shows only the links to a page, where I believe that ATW shows the links to the site including deep links.

[DerekH]

JamaicanFood - yes, you won't know how many links you've got in Google.
I suspect that the comparative number that you and your competitor have will be a guide to how well you're doing, but I'd not say you're actually comparing like with like.

As for popularity checkers, well, they're assuming you CAN compare like with like and they're using the (cut-down) version of the links and assuming the pruning factor is the same for all sites.
It's probably not!

DerekH

[JamaicanFood]

OK Dave..

Exactly what are you telling me that ATW goes into the internal links and Google doesn't, because I have structured that of all my pages link back to my home page and plus I have a shopping cart software that allows every product to act as an HTML page creating more internal links totaling well over 1000 pages.

But if Google only takes what is listed on the actual page then that actually might be the trick, does google rank that home page and return it as number one.

Whats the deal..

[siteseo]

Dave's just saying that Google will only show a small sampling of the sites that link to the URL you included in the link: command, whereas ATW shows links to any pages within the same domain.