It looks like there’s been an update to Yahoo Site Explorer links today, I’ve noticed a large increase in inbound links for a number of different sites.
I first found that seoptimise.com had increased to 12,779 from around 10,000 which is great! 
But I’m not the only one, last week I noted down the total number of links for Digg, SEOmoz, Pronet Advertising and Tropical SEO and they have all received substantal increases too, maybe this is because they’re counting all the extra email links!
Digg: 80,581,285 -> 96,274,838
SEOmoz: 512,025 -> 700,970
Pronet Advertising: 198,313 -> 225,616
Tropical SEO: 13,803 -> 17,600
I just noticed that for all link searches you can only view the first 1,000 inbound links, I don’t think I’ve ever checked that far down before though so not sure if there’s always been a limit to this.
Maybe Yahoo! have agreed a deal with Facebook after all. Or more likely, my Internet Explorer browser is trying to trick me into blogging about a rumour which ended a while ago
It’s quite interesting that of all the .ico images that could have been mixed up the Yahoo one was used, even a new window and a CTRL+F5 page refresh doesn’t fix it, but everything’s fine in FireFox. Also if anyone knows how I can set MSN Messenger to open my Hotmail account using my default browser instead of a new IE window please let me know, I don’t think Microsoft have made that too easy though! 
Last month I noticed some strange Yahoo! results when searching for SEOptimise. This was listing all results related to “soroptimist” rather than anything to do with this website.
Since then I’ve been working on my own online reputation project by building up some social media profiles, signing up for some new forums and submiting the site to some new directories with business profile pages. In addition to this I have also purchased a Yahoo! Directory listing which I expect has been the biggest, single factor in controlling the search results for my company name. While performing this search on Yahoo.com today 9,880 SEOptimise results were returned instead of a list of soroptimist SERPs, this still included a suggestion of “Did you mean: soroptimist” but I prefer these results much better!
As reported by Search Engine Roundtable yesterday, there has recently been a link count update for both Yahoo! and Google Webmaster Central.
This has shown an increase from around 6,500 external links (although this was about 11,000 before dropping significantly a couple of weeks ago) for seoptimise.com to 12,391 on Yahoo! Site Explorer, Google Webmaster Central has also shown an increase with 10,653 links now counted.
The Yahoo directory meta tag is now here, with the Yahoo! Search blog confirming that a NOYDIR meta tag can now be used.
“So, as promised, we’re providing support for ‘NOYDIR’ which will recognize the following Meta tags on your pages:
<META NAME=”ROBOTS” CONTENT=”NOYDIR”>
or
<META NAME=”Slurp” CONTENT=”NOYDIR”>
For pages with this tag, we will not use Yahoo! Directory titles or abstracts for your URL in web search results.”
I’m pretty sure this isn’t new but after having problems in the past trying to update a Yahoo! Directory listing, I’ve found there is a changing your Yahoo! listing page. This should definitely be easier to use in the future than finding a contact email address or phone number!
When searching to see which sites were listed for a Yahoo! search on SEOptimise I found that none of the results were relevant and they all had something to do with soroptimist instead!
Here’s a screenshot of the Yahoo! SERPs (click image for full size):
The uk.yahoo.com results list the sites I would have expected to see with a suggestion of “Did you mean: soroptimist”. This makes far more sense to show the correct results alongside the suggestion rather than just forwarding to what they thought I meant.
I’ve submitted for a Yahoo! directory listing this week so hopefully this will help to return results related to SEOptimise when searching on Yahoo.com.
I also found another surprising result listed for the same search and an “SEOptimise blog” query on Yahoo! UK. Instead of listing the correct page title it displayed the blog owner/poster name instead, the correct title is listed however for the label page in 2nd place:
Aaron Wall has just posted that Wordtracker have launched new free version of their keyword tool.
Mike Mindel from Wordtracker commented about this to confirm that “We’re offering 100 results free, adult filtered with drill down into the long tail.”
This is excellent timing as the Overture keyword tool has been regularly unavailable for the last couple of days, although Yahoo! have confirmed that this has not gone but “the responsiveness of this free tool is diminished due to the sheer volume of hits it receives each day, therefore browsers may time out and error pages may appear but it doesn’t mean that this tool has been removed.”
Here is the Wordtracker keyword tool, this looks to be an excellent way to quickly find the popularity of search terms, based upon Dogpile.com and Metacrawler.com figures, and I especially like the way you can easily drilldown to the long tail results, as Mike said.
I noticed a new badge link on Yahoo! Site Explorer while checking a site’s backlinks this morning. This allows you to “Add a live badge to your blog or website that queries Site Explorer for the number of links to your site or page on the web.”
Here is the Yahoo! Site Explorer badge code which is the same for each site as it’s based upon the domain (or URL for links to a page). Unfortunately I can’t use JavaScript in a Blogger post but here is a screenshot of what the badges look like:
Yahoo! yesterday confirmed recent rumours by announcing they have joined forces with MyBlogLog in a deal believed to be worth over $10 million.
I’ve been using MyBlogLog for around a month on this blog and have found this to be an excellent way to view the identity of the sites users. To see how MyBlogLog works here’s a link to my profile, showing information about the sites I author, my communities and contacts.
