16 replies
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Hi all,

I've noticed over the last several days that the number of backlinks to my site has slowly been DECREASING according to Yahoo.

This is odd because I have been doing some serious backlink building (web 2.0 and profile links). My links are getting indexed by google pretty quickly with a technique I'm using but they are not showing up yet in the Yahoo backlinks list.

I'm not hugely concerned because my rankings seem to be slowly improving. I was just wondering if anyone has encountered this or if Yahoo has changed anything recently...
#backlinks #decreasing
  • Profile picture of the author cashcow
    Hi Dave,

    I'm just wondering if that could be due to some of the profile links being deleted?

    I don't do a lot of profile linking myself but I know one of the complaints is that a lot of times they get deleted once the administrators of the site realize that they are only for self serving purposes.

    As long as rankings are improving then who cares!

    Lee
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    Gone Fishing
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  • Profile picture of the author AlexKei
    This is absolutely normal. In fact, Yahoo Linkdomain function is not vert accurate.

    I don't know exactly how it works but I have seen it doesn't index (or show) each and every backlink pointing to a website.

    Even worst is google. When you search using "link:yourdomain.com" it doesn't show not even a 5% of the actual backlinks.

    ALex.
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  • Profile picture of the author Rich Rockets
    One thing I notice time and time again when people are backlink building...

    If you are dropping blog comments, even if not spam, some sites have a "recent comments" box, that (if yahoo sees it at the right time) will boost your backlinks by 1,000-10,000 links or more (depending on how many pages the blog has) almost instantly.

    Those links then die off quickly as yahoo re-crawls the site.
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    • Profile picture of the author kikolani
      Originally Posted by Rich Rockets View Post

      One thing I notice time and time again when people are backlink building...

      If you are dropping blog comments, even if not spam, some sites have a "recent comments" box, that (if yahoo sees it at the right time) will boost your backlinks by 1,000-10,000 links or more (depending on how many pages the blog has) almost instantly.

      Those links then die off quickly as yahoo re-crawls the site.
      I never thought of that, but it's a good point.

      I also think that some that come up as lost are ones where the sites (especially social networks / profiles) change to redirect links instead of direct links.
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  • Profile picture of the author Marko Vel
    What about Google? Do you get similar results?
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    • Profile picture of the author jpf239
      Google will penalize if the quality of your backlinks are bad, they will drop your sites ranking, they want the links to be perfectly relevant or they will do more harm than good. Don't know about Yahoo, but since Google owns it, well...
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      • Profile picture of the author paulgl
        Originally Posted by jpf239 View Post

        Google will penalize if the quality of your backlinks are bad, they will drop your sites ranking, they want the links to be perfectly relevant or they will do more harm than good. Don't know about Yahoo, but since Google owns it, well...
        Yeah. Sure. That's why people flood the warriorforum with sig links.

        Beware, people! Delete them now!

        Just because google does not count lousy backlinks does not mean
        a penalty.

        Since when does google own yahoo? But I digress. That statement
        points out what people should think of your whole post.

        Paul
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        If you were disappointed in your results today, lower your standards tomorrow.

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  • Profile picture of the author jason_simpson
    Search Engines change in algorithm sometimes includes a clean-up of links giving no value to some links nor discarding it from their index.
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    Jason Simpson
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  • Profile picture of the author xxxJamesxxx
    Google will penalize if the quality of your backlinks are bad, they will drop your sites ranking, they want the links to be perfectly relevant or they will do more harm than good. Don't know about Yahoo, but since Google owns it, well...
    If this was true, everybody would be linkbombing the competition
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  • Profile picture of the author webcreationuk
    I also noticed for one of my blogs backlinks decreased few days ago, but this morning appeared again with some "reinforcements". I don't quite know what's the catch, Google's playing maybe.
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  • Profile picture of the author FrankBowman
    Google has no linking penalty!!!!!!

    They may value a particular link at 0 and if you create a 1000 "0 value" links in a month, then the "linking value" of your site will go down, which means lowers serps and possible lower PR at the next update.

    But as far as I can see, there is no linking penalty where a link would have a negative value like "-2".........negative link values don't exist IMHO, otherwise I could take down my competitors by simply building "negative links" to their sites. Google knows you can't control who links to your site, so they can't give you a "link penalty"

    Frank
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  • Profile picture of the author FrankBowman
    In fact, if you outbound link to a pure spam site, then yes, they'll penalize you for that because that is under your control.
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  • Profile picture of the author badboy_Nick
    Originally Posted by dswift33 View Post

    Hi all,

    I've noticed over the last several days that the number of backlinks to my site has slowly been DECREASING according to Yahoo.

    This is odd because I have been doing some serious backlink building (web 2.0 and profile links). My links are getting indexed by google pretty quickly with a technique I'm using but they are not showing up yet in the Yahoo backlinks list.

    I'm not hugely concerned because my rankings seem to be slowly improving. I was just wondering if anyone has encountered this or if Yahoo has changed anything recently...
    Maybe some pages your links were on got deleted, sandboxed, banned, sites marked as dupes?

    Theres lots of reasons for this, especially when Yahoo is involved ... they are always second best to Google so no wonder here.

    Nick
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    Read my incredible story: www.affiliatechamp.co.uk
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  • Profile picture of the author Groovystar
    I would try and make sure that your backlinks you build have a good chance to be long term. I only sig-link on forums I actually intend to contribute to and enjoy posting in and that are at least somewhat relevant to my site or keywords. Blog comments quickly get buried under more and more layers of recent blog entries. They seem more short term to me.
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  • Profile picture of the author John34
    You mentioned about profile links, those kind of links have very high chance of getting deleted, personally i have stopped building profile links as they hardly have any SEO value.
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  • Profile picture of the author tommy6336
    I've seen some people talking about how Yahoo likes the quantity of links and Google likes the Quality of links.

    So if you try to please one you'll anger the other. I'd say just play with Google's rules so that every other search engine, that isn't yahoo, is happy.
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    I'm hoping to find a ton of people with great advice for my future business ventures. Thanks in Advance!!!
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