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

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.

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.

What about Google? Do you get similar results?

Search Engines change in algorithm sometimes includes a clean-up of links giving no value to some links nor discarding it from their index.

If this was true, everybody would be linkbombing the competition

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.