webmaster tools "links to your site"

Google Webmaster Tools "links to your site" shows massively higher numbers than Yahoo Site Explorer, SEOQuake, or other online tools for all my sites - for one site, Webmaster tools shows over 7,000 links while Site Explorer shows less than 200. Is that typical? And do all those links Webmaster Tools shows "count", in terms of SEO?

Ive noticed this as well. I'm not sure what it is measuring yet.

What i have noticed is that these kinds of pages show differnt number of links, how and why i dont know

Hey zceckes,
In webmaster tool if you click on details then you can easily notice that total number of backlinks shown by webmaster tool is for all pages of your site. For clearness see the below given example:

For Webmaster Tool:
For e.g your site have 3 pages.
1) example.com
2) example.com/page1.html
3) example.com/page2.html

So total number of backlinks to 1st, 2nd and 3rd page is shown by webmaster tool.

For Site Explorer:
Same number of pages as above but if you see on site explorer with the query "link:hxxp://example.com" then it only shows backlinks pointing to just page example.com not to example.com/page1.html or on page2.html

I think now you can understand their difference.

the-MHR said:

For Site Explorer:
Same number of pages as above but if you see on site explorer with the query "link:hxxp://example.com" then it only shows backlinks pointing to just page example.com not to example.com/page1.html or on page2.html

Click to expand...

But in Site Explorer, you can change the settings to show all links pointing to the entire site.. yet, the number of backlinks vary between what yahoo shows and what Google Webmaster shows..

maybe it has to do with diff. SE's diff. methodologies in indexing?