I'm working on trying to improve the overall organic search results for an existing site. According to Google, they show that my site has only 9 incoming links. According to Yahoo I have more than 260 inbound links. I understand that this is very important for page value/site value, but can anyone explain why the wide difference? Better yet, how can I get Google to recognize more of the inbound links?

FYI- these are unique one-way links.

Thanks in advance for any feedback and insight.

Welcome to SEF!

Google just show's you a small random sample of a site's backward links. When researching backlinks most do as you are and reference yahoo or msn which show you a complete list of backlinks and make the "fairly good" assumption that those pages/links included in yahoo or msn are also included within google's index.

So in short, you have more backlinks in google and they are playing a role in your rankings. But google just doesn't show them all. Additionally, another factor - they delay the results for that type of search query by a few months typically.

Thanks Logan.

That gives me some peace of mind. I don't understand why there would be a delay in that type of query results.

It appears that most (if not all) of the inbound links are only directing clicks to the home page... is it more advantageous to have those inbound links be more specific? Does this effect the score/rank of these links?

Does anyone have any advice on how to improve the inbound linking value? Do keywords play a role in this link?

Well, the reason is partly because webmasters manipulate links to improve rankings ... and google probably doesn't want to make it to easy.

Regarding where your links go, home page is common but linking to specific pages does help those pages rank better. Often this is called 'deep linking'.

Regarding other factors, yes keywords within the 'link text' do play a role. Along with other factors as well. For example, the text on the page with the link. How many other links point to that page and so forth.

Additionally, outside of this just as a search engine looks at all of this with links from other sites. They also look at your own sites links/navigation. The text within those links. A simple step along those lines is to provide a good sitemap to each page of your site. A sitemap page itself may provide rankings also.

Thanks again Logan.

This and all feedback is greatly appreciated and timely.

but can anyone explain why the wide difference

Like Logan says, Google doesn't show us the backlinks they know about. They do that on purpose.