Yahoo!, Google, SEO And Backlinks

Writing by Nick Stamoulis on Wednesday, 3 of September , 2008 at 8:59 pm

The forums at DigitalPoint have been discussing the apparent change in Yahoo! back link counts. One voice appears to have lost 5000 links. From an SEO point of view, this could be a heavy loss; it really depends on what percentage those links form. If his starting point is in excess of 20,000, a 25% loss is significant.

Google can be very slow at updating their back link counts. Most SEO experts become quite frustrated with the delay between creating a link and its appearance in Google’s stats. Google are also fairly fastidious as to what they call a link. Yahoo! may show several thousand links while Google will only show several hundred.

There are many reasons behind this difference, one of the major ones being no follows and how they are handled. It has been apparent that Yahoo! often counts no follow links. For this reason alone a link on a nofollow site can still be useful to your ultimate SEO goals. Yahoo! is also prepared to count multiple links on the one page where Google will generally only count the link once. However, one commenter on DigitalPoint made the observation that:

My gut feeling is that Yahoo could be:
• Discounting forum signature links.
• Or perhaps cleaning out old links from now-defunct, quick-buck directories.

Sometimes there can a real risk in becoming too absorbed in the data. Search engines will change their algorithms without warning. The focus should be on delivering what the consumers or visitors are looking for. The major search engines will over time use the habits of users to determine rank as much as external factors such as linking. Search engine optimization will become much tougher as time goes by, however, if you can attract visitors and keep them on your site; this will overtime do as much for your rankings as any back link.

                      Category: Link Building                      

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