Change to Yahoo LINKDOMAIN results?

[FranceFan]

I have a 6 month old site. Every month (until this week), my link count has grown and this has shown up when I do a Yahoo LINKDOMAIN command.

This week, my total number of links continues to go up (from about 600 to about 700), but when I go to look at the list of links (The one with the message "In order to show you the most relevant results, we have omitted some entries very similar to the ones already displayed.") the count of "non-similar links" has plunged from 400 to 230.

Looking at the list of links, it seems to me that this is PARTLY explained by Yahoo excluding almost all of my WEB site pages (I can only see 2 pages unless I tell Yahoo to "repeat the search with the omitted results included"). Before, many of my pages were included. My pages are all good unique content which I've written myself.

At the same time, my position in Yahoo for my keyword (ok, a 2-word phrase) has droped from 62 to 84.

Can anyone explain why this is happening. Has Yahoo changed this week the way it calculates links?

[Zygoot]

Looks like Yahoo changed something.

I just did a link check and it's almost three times lower than a week ago.

[lufc1955]

Two thirds lower links showing for us too. No change in rankings that I can see. Seems to be a change in their link calculation.

[longen]

My Link count on Yahoo dropped by over 50% overnight on the 3rd August - i assumed at the time that it was to to the 301 non-www to www taking effect. The 301 dated from 31st March.

On the same date the number of pages in the Yahoo index dropped from 11K tp 5K which reflects the actual number of pages i have live.

[mack]

Well, long term this will hep us out in a rather indirect way. It is now much harder for your opposition to do a link: check for your domain and go after your links.

I belive this is Yahoo following on from Google.

I think they have a full link count, but just don't make it public.

Mack.

[phidentity]

Oh great. Yahoo's link domain was really useful. Do any other search engines have fully working link commands?

jon

[jbgilbert]

I agree with Mack.... as of yesterday, some of the automatic backlink tools quit working at Yahoo also (meaning the layout of the Yahoo backlink pages must have changed a good bit).

We had already noticed (in July) that Yahoo had crippled certain backlink strings and had the feeling that they were following in Google's foot steps. Kinda funny this happened just after they openly stated they would provide a special DB for people to use in doing just this very thing...

At this point, if I were Mr. Gates, I'd take a different approach (keep it open and honest and let the world know about it) than did Google and Yahoo --- MSN "desperately needs" to be different in EVERY respect to have a chance in a game they have gotten so far behind in!

[jez_kewler]

well - with the yahoo siteexplorer they want to get the BL analysers to their dedicated link-data servers, hence take some load off the main query servers...

just checkout the yahoo siteexplorer when it's live... all the tools need to migrate to that ASAP

[sugarrae]

>>>some of the automatic backlink tools quit working at Yahoo

Those that are on the ball already have fixes.

[edited by: jcoronella at 4:00 pm (utc) on Sep. 2, 2005]

[sugarrae]

>>>(I can only see 2 pages unless I tell Yahoo to "repeat the search with the omitted results included"). Before, many of my pages were included. My pages are all good unique content which I've written myself.

I'd imagine that a link being "similar" is not the same as content being similar. If they are grouping "like" links, it would cut down on seeing the same scraper site 500 times in someone's backlinks without having to enter additional commands.

Is anyone with a very small site without a huge amount of ROS or scraper backlinks seeing big drops in their backlinks counts?

[edited by: jcoronella at 4:00 pm (utc) on Sep. 2, 2005]
[edit reason] no kicking please. ;) [/edit]

[jcoronella]

Should reduce the bot load on Y! search as well ;)

[physics]

OK, I'm confused. Are you saying they're showing less linkdomain results from your own web site? If so that's not really a bad thing, I usually use
linkdomain:example.com -site:example.com
anyway.
The standard linkdomain inflates link counts for sites with a large number of pages versus sites with few pages. That being said I do like to see how many backlinks they're counting to my domain from my own domain ;)
Or are you saying it's not showing some links from _other_ web sites. This would be more disturbing. I think that the search engines are using _our_ data to make a living and thus should at least show us the data like back links.

[rustybrick]

I spoke with Tim Mayer about this and he let me say that the new link count is more accurate and nothing else. Why did it change? He said it was because back on July 20, 2005, I wrote a blog entry complaining about how the Yahoo! link command fluctuated way too much on Yahoo! Search and the Yahoo! Search API. Based on that, he made the numbers more consistent and more accurate.

I do not know what is exactly meant by "more accurate" but maybe it means that Yahoo! is better at keeping linkage data (at least in the link count) fresher.

[helleborine]

My link count on Google is 100.

My link count on Yahoo went from 7550 to 1810.

I would venture that 1810 is more accurate!

[Lorel]

Mine dropped from 5110 a few days ago to 1270. However I noticed that it grossely inflated to 5110 sometime after May 24 when it was 1300 so the current link record is more accurate.

It appears that Yahoo has corrected a link inflation problem.

[Marcia]

Is anyone with a very small site without a huge amount of ROS or scraper backlinks seeing big drops in their backlinks counts?

Very, very small, a couple very new - no ROS at all, and just a modest amount of scrapers on those, which happens right off as soon as you turn up at MSN.

No change, it all looks the same except for the sequencing and I'm not so sure it's such a good idea how they're doing that now.

[econman]

I just read a post on one of the SEO blogs (name reminds me of a circular sitting area) which says:

...Tim (Mayer) said based on that, he had his team make the link command more accurate and report more consistent results.