I'm doing research on a competitor's website, trying to find out how many backlinks they have, and this is the results I got:
opensiteexplorer.org: 0
majesticseo.com: 25,573
SEOQuake: 14

I read elsewhere that some backlink checkers count non-indexed sites, and others don't. Can someone explain the difference? I'm assuming that the 25k result contains a bunch of crap backlinks that aren't worth all that much. I'm trying to get quality results, through white hat methods, so I was wondering if it's possible for me to figure out if I should just focus on the 14 results or the 25k results?

Bump.

Quite a few of the backlinks checkers will not be working properly anymore because yahoo sit explorer closed down and they used that. I think backlinkwatch.com is still working so you could try that and see what results you get.