Hi Kirsten,
It's not actually the number of backlinks that count but the quality of backlinks. A few high quality backlinks have more value than lots and lots of low quality backlinks.
All backlinks are not the same in quality and that obtaining a bunch of low-quality links can actually harm your search engine ranking rather than improving it. You are at risk for being flagged by Google (in particular) and the other search engines.
Stay away from hundreds of links that all come from the same origin (usually referred to as “link farmsâ€). These are easily tracked and very much frowned upon by the search engines so they will get you nowhere fast. Also steer clear of businesses that advertise the buying and selling of links – these links will also sooner or later be flagged by the search engines and they are not worth the risk.
There is also no set number of backlinks to be established in order to achieve a certain position in search results. Backlinks constitute only one of the more than 200 parameters that google uses (and google does not tell us what all those 200+ parameters are) to determine rankings and so we can not make generalizations as to how many backlinks are needed to get to the top position.
Unfortunately, it is not yet possible for Link hidden: Login to view (or any other SEO software in particular) to display ALL the backlinks of a given site at this stage. Nevertheless, Traffic Travis still provides one of the most accurate backlinks data than most of the SEO tools available in the market.
Hope this helps :)