Yahoo backlinks tool shows massive reduction

Posted by Josh on Wednesday, February 28th, 2007.

Today we examined backlink statistics using Yahoo the same way we always do, and we noticed a huge drop in the number of backlinks reported. We don’t yet know of any reason for this change, but we have data spanning it for three websites that suggest that it is systematic.

How to check backlinks in Yahoo
We use a link like this to check the number of backlinks. It lists sites that point to the domain that don’t reside on the domain.

Here is what we have seen over the last few days:

	2/26/2007	2/27/2007	2/28/2007
Site 1	—	1440	758
Site 2	2640	—	2060
Site 3	2260	—	2170

At the same time, a similar check using MSN search showed normal behavior:

	2/26/2007	2/27/2007	2/28/2007
Site 1	—	1602	1616
Site 2	3426	—	3437
Site 3	5081	—	5125

What to make of this? It appears as though Yahoo is either determining that many links are from sites that are somehow not worthy of consideration, or that they are starting to follow Google’s lead and disclosing a subset of the links.

We’ll keep an eye on this to see if we can determine what impact this has on ranking, and we’ll let you know if we come up with definitive information.