Checking Backlinks with Yahoo

October 16th, 2007 by Scott

Checking your backlinks on Yahoo, or checking those of your competitors can be confusing, especially if you’re trying to keep track of progress on a weekly or monthly basis.

Not to mention the fact that there seem to be new tools available every month, and various reporting services “update” their procedures, so it’s getting hard to know the who, what, when and how of services and tools that are reporting links.

Use Yahoo for this, and you supposedly get all of the links Yahoo knows about excluding those from your own domain -
linkdomain:www.domain.com -site:www.domain.com

You may also search without the www and see different numbers
linkdomain:domain.com -site:domain.com

The fact that www and non www numbers are different is not something to fret over, but it is something to decide for yourself, then use a consistent standard, and stick with it.

To avoid driving yourself crazy, decide to track only one of them month-to-month, (like www) and focus any link building efforts on www. versions as well

Then there’s Yahoo Site Explorer, which in most cases will support higher numbers, and give it a more in-depth analysis. This is my preferred method.

“Exploring” a URL there gives several different results. First, there are two options at the top, “Pages” and “Inlinks”

“Pages” lists the index pages in the search engine from your domain, but Inlinks is where it can get confusing.

For Inlinks you have three options to show links:
1. From All Pages (which is supposed to include those from your own domain)
2. Except from this Domain (this is supposed to exclude all links originating from your domain name)
3. Except From this Subdomain (used only if you are working with a subdomain on your site)

Then you have two more options for each of your previous choices:
1. to “Entire Site”
2. to “Only this URL” (For checking the inlink counts of specific pages)

Occasionally, when reviewing the options, and they don’t appear to change, and you have to re-select your choices. It’s always worked a bit buggy like this for me, even on different computers.

Another problem you may notice is that you can never quite duplicate, or even come very close to the same amount of inlinks shown at http://search.yahoo.com/search with the command linkdomain:www.domain.com -site:www.domain.com

Why? What is the difference between linkdomain:www.domain.com -site:www.domain.com at Yahoo, and “Show Inlinks Except from this Domain” to “Entire Site” at Yahoo site Explorer?

The count is always substantially different. Is this because it’s using different databases? Different data centers? That makes no sense because they are eternally and completely unmatched.

Most experts seem to agree that using Site Explorer is a more accurate representation, but I want to know why… What’s the difference? What’s your opinion?