My backlinks dropped by over half overnight! Help me understand this....

[NoFluorescentLights]

I had been consistently and tastefully/respectfully building backlinks, and was up over 200 on both my sites. literally overnight they dropped to about 75 each, and then again to the 40's!. This surprising hasnt killed my rankings though, in fact, ive moved up to new highs for a couple of keywords and the others seem pretty stable. what is going on? (i am using market samurai to check rankings/backlinks, they use yahoo's inlinks info).

A couple ideas:

- yahoo is behind, updating only so often and many of the links have expired? (only been building for about 2 months so seems unlikely)

- yahoo/google caught on to the sites that my backlinking source uses to post to and has deindexed or otherwise hurt those sites

- my backinlinking source posted many duplicates that then became deindexed or uncounted?

- there is a "yahoo backlink dance" similar to that of a google ranking dance?

Thats about all the possibilities i can come up with, anyone with experience or insight otherwise please share. Thanks

[leclaims]

I've seen this before, might just be an updating thing. I wouldn't worry about it much. If you're doing things the right way, and it sounds like you are, then I would just press on.

[Derek S]

if you are using yahoo site explorer it happens often. Your backlinks have not been cut in half, just the number yahoo site explorer will DISPLAY. If you are tracking 1-3 of your competitors backlink efforts, you will see a reduced number of backlinks displayed for them as well.

number will go back up in 1-4 weeks so don't worry about it and just keep building and pinging your links

[terryd]

I'm pretty sure this has happened to everybody so don't get too stressed over it, it doesn't seem to (or as far as I can tell) affect rankings, just the reported links in Yahoo....

[Tom Goodwin]

Perhaps you missed this thread...

Site Explorer Links decreased dramatically for you?

The short answer: don't worry about it.

Originally Posted by NoFluorescentLights

I had been consistently and tastefully/respectfully building backlinks, and was up over 200 on both my sites. literally overnight they dropped to about 75 each, and then again to the 40's!. This surprising hasnt killed my rankings though, in fact, ive moved up to new highs for a couple of keywords and the others seem pretty stable. what is going on? (i am using market samurai to check rankings/backlinks, they use yahoo's inlinks info).

A couple ideas:

- yahoo is behind, updating only so often and many of the links have expired? (only been building for about 2 months so seems unlikely)

- yahoo/google caught on to the sites that my backlinking source uses to post to and has deindexed or otherwise hurt those sites

- my backinlinking source posted many duplicates that then became deindexed or uncounted?

- there is a "yahoo backlink dance" similar to that of a google ranking dance?

Thats about all the possibilities i can come up with, anyone with experience or insight otherwise please share. Thanks

[siri om]

If that happened to you around 20th oct, than we are in the same boat. Seems google/yahoo are doing smth. My competitors lost links as well, 1/3-2/3 them, now we all are restored...

[bonusdays]

This is a recent integration issue between Yahoo! and Bing.

Read this for details: http://www.seroundtable.com/archives/023126.html