In a move thats probably going to send the BlogStorm tracker haywire Yahoo has had a big update on the way they measure backlinks this week.
BlogStorm.co.uk used to have 50,000 links from external pages to the entire domain, this number has dropped to 3,549.
SEOmoz used to have over 1.35 million links but 1 million have been wiped out.
Assuming Yahoo are reporting links more accurately this is good news although it might take a bit of getting used to for some webmasters.
Previously Yahoo used to report links weeks after they disappeared resulting in large spikes when posts hit the front page of Digg.
How has your inlink count fared this week?
Patrick Altoft is Director of Search at Leeds based digital & SEO agency Branded3. Patrick also runs Blogstorm.You can get our blog posts delivered for free by email every day - simply add your email address to the box below or alternatively grab the RSS feed.
{ 11 comments… read them below or add one }
This all seems fine to me, blogstorm.co.uk has 57,336 external inbound links, 1,598,881 for SEOmoz.
I think that’s a good thing. My blog is very new and Yahoo was reporting hundreds of links back to it which I knew weren’t there. If you actually want to use that information, having such inflated numbers makes it virtually impossible.
God. You are right. 17 down to 3.
Kevin, when I click the link in your comment I see totally different figures. Will be interesting to see how it develops.
links from my pages are fine and also..
Inlinks (1,634,004) for SEOMoz
so everything seems normal.
10,000 down to 2,000 for one client I just checked.
Patrick – when Site Explorer does this (which we see every once in a while), I tend to go back to using the manual link searches like “linkdomain:seomoz.org -site:seomoz.org” at Yahoo! – which still reports around 1mil and for Blogstorm gives 14K… Frustrating because it’s hard to know which is the the most accurate.
Hmm, 4259. Not as drastic a reduction as you saw, naturally, but still.
Interesting that the data is different. There is also a forum thread with others reporting this fall.
Mine has dropped a good amount as well. Can’t remember the exact amount, but I think it was around 300 before now its about 60.
Site Explorer is VERY sluggish right now but is reporting Inlinks (93,020) for toprankblog.com, down by about 500k.
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