Link Popularity and Yahoo

[AdamH]

One of my clients recently had their link popularity jump from 1,300 to 37,000 in a little less than a single month. We did implement a link campaign with some success, but this jump doesn't correspond with link popularity results presented by any other search engine.

Has this happened with anyone else? Has yahoo changed the way they count inbound links?

Best Regards,

[removed signature per SEW guidelines]

[rustybrick]

Which command are you using in Yahoo to count links?

[AdamH]

link:http://www.domain.com is the command I use. I use Web CEO to automate monitoring it on a regular basis, but the results are the same.

regards,

Adam

[rustybrick]

Its hard to tell, numbers seem ok for my tests.

You have to look at the results in yahoo for that specific case.

[Dodger]

Yahoo does appear to be reporting considerably more backlinks than any other SE right now. It also appears that there is no bias on those backlinks either. I am seeing links on pages that list referral Urls for instance, and if you check the cache of the page at Yahoo -- sure enough there is the backlink although that page may be a few weeks old.

Due to the slow nature of Slurp coming back around to reindex some of these pages, I can see where they might accumulate after a while. If they don't have any form of quality control over this type of reporting, then the question is how much will they count toward popularity at this point in time.

[qwerty]

AdamH, did you see a ranking improvement along with this leap in link pop? It seems to me that while Yahoo reports far more backlinks than Google, link pop plays a much smaller role in ranking there.

[Everyman]

In Yahoo you can do something with the link: command that you cannot do in Google. It can be very useful.

The basic command is link:http://www.mydomain.com

But you can also add keywords after this command to restrict the results to pages that contain that word in addition to that link. You can even add this command to the above line:
-site:www.mydomain.com

This excludes your internal links, which I'm unable to do on Google. Note that with the link: command you need the http:// in front of your domain, and in the site: command you should NOT have it in front. So the full command to show external links on Yahoo is:
link:http://www.mydomain.com -site:www.mydomain.com

The number indicated on top will be a lot higher than any useful indicator you can use. It includes, for example, blogrolls from blogs that may have your domain on every single archive page, each of which adds to the number. The number of external links that are important to you can be found by scrolling down and figuring out at what point Yahoo says that further links have been omitted and you have to click to see them. The number in front of the last link right above this is the best number to record if you're trying to keep track of how your external linking campaign is doing.

Yahoo only shows 1000 links maximum, same as Google.

[minstrel]

link:www.mydomain.com -site:www.mydomain.com
does work on Google, although you'll find more backlinks this way:
@:www.mydomain.com -site:www.mydomain.com

This also works on Google:
keyword1 keyword2 -site:www.mydomain.com
to search for keywords for sites other than the specified site.

[seomike]

good post that's pretty niffty :D