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Yahoo Site Explorer Lies

I’m not sure for how long, but I run a bunch of sites though Yahoo Site Explorer each month to track inlinks and indexed pages and this month my numbers were way off from previous months.

It seems, that by default, Yahoo Site Explorer is setup to count inlinks from all URLs (including the one I’m checking) and only links to the homepage.

You must click on the InLinks link and switch it to count all inlinks except those from the domain you’re checking and tell it count inlinks to the entire site.

Now I feel a little gipped because it seems that the options are good in some cases, but I don’t feel they should be the default options. But maybe that’s just me.

You also get different results if you use www or not when you are searching for inlinks to the entire site. To me, entire site means every page, every possible URL and those numbers should be the same.

Here is my Example with twistermc.com:
Checking Inlinks from the main Yahoo Site Explorer page: 13,334

Checking Inlinks from the main Inlinks page and selecting ‘except this domain’ and to the ‘entire site’: with the URL www.twistermc.com: 86,139

Checking Inlinks from the main Inlinks page and selecting ‘except this domain’ and to the ‘entire site’: with the URL twistermc.com: 88,857

I guess entire site doesn’t include any sub-domains. So it’s all in how you look at it. Come to think of it, I don’t think I have any sub-domains. So how am I getting different results?

Just be careful when using Yahoo Site Explorer. It’s a great tool, but you’ll be getting different numbers unless you make sure you are always checking the exact same way every time.

Now I’ll have to update yExplore to send people to the correct URL so they get the most accurate number of Pages and Inlinks for the site they are checking. Look for that next week.


1 Response

  1. 5/13/2006

    […] yExplore 1.1beta changes the URL structure that access’ Yahoo Site Explorer. It’ll now give you the most accurate data right away. The change is is in response to my odd Yahoo Site Explorer findings. […]

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