What is the difference between doing a "link:http://www.example.com" google search and the "links to your site" in Webmaster Tools?

What is the difference between doing a "link:http://www.example.com" google search and the "links to your site" in Webmaster Tools? - Google Search Console is a free application that allows you to identify, troubleshoot, and resolve any issues that Google may encounter as it crawls and attempts to index your website in search results. If you’re not the most technical person in the world, some of the errors you’re likely to encounter there may leave you scratching your head. We wanted to make it a bit easier, so we put together this handy set of tips about google-search-console, google-search, , to guide you along the way. Read the discuss below, we share some tips to fix the issue about What is the difference between doing a "link:http://www.example.com" google search and the "links to your site" in Webmaster Tools?.Problem :

I've tried to do two kinds of searches which I had previously thought were a source of the same data, but are apparently different.

The first is doing a google search that looks like link:http://mydomain.com which I assumed returned all of the links indexed by Google Crawler which linked to my page:

The second is within Webmaster Tools in the Links to Your Site functionality:

The reason I'm confused by this is that it appears that there don't seem to be as many in-bound links appearing in the link: google search as there are appearing in the Links on Your Site functionality in Webmaster Tools, so it seems to me that these two functions are not referring to the same data as I previously assumed.

If this is not the case, then what are each of these referring to?

Solution :

They're basically both from the "same data." Google reveals what Google reveals, which in general, seems to be some links publicly for anyone to see and more links privately for those who have confirmed they have access to the site. Google doesn't even reveal every link it knows about to webmasters; it's all a combination of choice and physical limitations. Here Matt Cutts explains some of the different limitations and reasons for those limitations.

If the issue about google-search-console, google-search, , is resolved, there’s a good chance that your content will get indexed and you’ll start to show up in Google search results. This means a greater chance to drive organic search traffic to your site.