Decrease in External Links

[delsoijj]

Hello,

I have been using Yahoo Site Explorer for my external link tracking for 6 months now. It appears that my site has been increase in links month over month but the last few days I have noticed a dramatic drop in links (60 - 70% decrease!) and I am now concerned. Is anyone seeing drops also? Is anyone aware of a glitch in Yahoo Site Explorer?

[Planet13]

I thought yahoo was going to let YSE drift off into the sunset...

[stateofsearch.com...]

[JonBMX3]

I would highly recommend using Open Site Explorer from SEOmoz. At the same time, if you are using YSE... could you have forgotten to add "entire site" in the second dropdown?

[delsoijj]

Yes I am actually purchasing SEOmoz very soon. Actually it was actually YSE shutting down and telling users to use Bing Webmaster data for links.

[ZydoSEO]

Personally, I tend to used a lot of different tools depending on what I am trying to research or do, rather than tools suites like Raventools, SEOmoz, etc. Don't get me wrong... Raven and SEOmoz are both great tools. However, the suites tend to be pretty good at a lot of things (jack of all trades, master of none) versus the individual tools being really good at their niche.

I'm a big fan of Majestic SEO for back link analysis. Raventools and most of the major tool suites like that today (SEOmoz being an exception) actually use Majestic SEO for their back linking data. It provides tons of link specific information.

For example, for every link they report they will tell you things like the referring URL, the anchor text, whether the link is a follow or nofollow link, whether its an image or text link, if image then whether or not there was an alt attribute (and if so, its value), whether the linked URL triggered a redirect or not, whether the link was part of a frame/iframe, etc. I used to download YSE links into a spreadsheet and then run a PHP script I wrote to request those pages and try to log a lot of the stuff that comes with Majestic.

Of course, as with everything... you have to understand the source of the data... things like these are links that THEIR crawler has found while crawling the web for the last 4-5 years which could be very different from links that Google's and Microsoft's crawlers find. But still, it's invaluable as a research tool.

Again, it's just ONE tool... but unlike suites of tools from companies like SEOmoz, Raven, etc... Majestic SEO's tool is dedicated to back link analysis, and I think it's probably the most useful tool on the market at the moment for analyzing back links.