I think the big 3 search engines have done a great job at stopping normal SEO’s and web masters checking out back links.
First off Live.com well they just pulled the link: and linkdomain: a while ago, hopefully they will add it into the webmaster.live.com
Google hasn’t for years shown real link data and yahoo show’s nofollow links and historical links that have been removed months and months ago..
so let’s look at some numbers for www.davidnaylor.co.uk which we can get
Google Webmastercentral returns 34,903
Google “link:www.davidnaylor.co.uk” 1,730 pages
Google “davidnaylor.co.uk” = 9,560 pages ( shows occurrences )
Yahoo siteexplorer UK version Inlinks (8,348)
Yahoo siteexplorer US version Inlinks (134,594)
Yahoo search for davidnaylor.co.uk -davidnaylor.co.uk returns 1500 ( shows occurrences -my site )
Of course you can only get around 1000 results unless you are the site owner, so what can we use other than the commercial competitive analysis tools like Hitwise, Syntryx etc etc ..
DaveN