Forum Moderators: martinibuster
Just wondering, why do different search engines give different results when you check who is linking to a site. For example, I recently got these results for a site:
Alltheweb - 4,884, AltaVista - 4,633m, AOL - 5,749, Google - 2,700 and MSN - 6,093.
I would have thought Google would be higher because it includes links from internal pages. Any ideas which might the most reliable source of info? If this has been covered before, apologies.
Because different engines use different indexes, and therefore have different "views" of the Web. In this case, presumably you have a higher number of links in AOL than Google, because AOL has found more sites that link to you. This may be to do with how long your site has been in existence, the crawling habits of the various spiders, which SE is banning which sites that link to you etc, etc
The other possibility that springs to mind is using slightly variant search strings, ie a search for
free stuff
will likely return different (and more) results than
"free stuff"
Its such a small thing, but it can produce really puzzling results if you do something differently. I'm sure some of the others will think of the things I missed
Dazz
Billy
