Yahoo Site Explorer Showing Different Counts For Registered vs. Non-Registered Users

Yahoo Site Explorer is a wonderful tool to check your page index count and the number and source of links you have pointing to your site. But did you know that you get different results if you are logged into Site Explorer when compared to not being logged in and authenticated for that site?

Here is a Site Explorer search for this site, but I am not logged into Yahoo:

Notice, here Yahoo reports seroundtable.com to have 14,999 pages indexed in Yahoo and a total of 57,146 inlinks to the home page from all pages. Now let's compare...

Here is a Site Explorer search for this site, but this time I am logged into Yahoo under the account I authenticated this site for:

Notice, here Yahoo reports seroundtable.com to have 15,556 pages indexed in Yahoo and a total of 216,880 inlinks to the home page from all pages.

That is a huge difference in numbers. 57,146 inlinks and 216,880 inlinks is a huge difference in the amount of data one can get about a site.

Is it possible that Yahoo is pulling back on showing all linkage data for a site to anyone? Now you need to be the authenticated webmaster to see full data? This is similar to how Google works.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

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posted rustybrick in Yahoo! Search Optimization at October 12, 2007 7:22 AM Comments (9)

Comments

I noticed that. Now how I can pull the "logged in" version via Yahoo API?

Posted by Halfdeck at October 12, 2007 07:45

Thanks for the mention! My colleague Tristan and her team here at DigitalGrit spotted the discrepancy yesterday. I couldn't find any documented explanations for this oddity, so I figured that someone over at WW would know the answer. And, of course, I wasn't disappointed.

Posted by Hugo Guzman at October 12, 2007 11:35

I don't see where anyone in the discussion at WMW knows the answer. Someone took a guess.

Personally, I wouldn't trust Yahoo!'s link or page counts farther than I can throw them. They include a lot of non-existing pages and links in those reports.

Posted by Michael Martinez at October 12, 2007 12:46

Well the fact that everyone who has tried to query Yahoo Site Explorer, both while logged in and while logged out, is replicating the results suggested in the forum is as much proof as anyone can get.

Try it yourself before dismissing it, Michael.

Posted by Hugo Guzman at October 12, 2007 16:54

I had my eye on this for almost 2 weeks now. You can also use the seo for firefox plugin to get almost a relevant count.

Posted by Mack at October 12, 2007 19:41

@Halfdeck - Yahoo wants webmasters to visit their site in order to see their link analysis. If we all used API's their traffic would dissappear:)

Posted by CVOS man at October 15, 2007 14:24

For me, it's buggy all over. Logged in or logged out, I get the same original results across the board. But they change once I click Pages.
Yahoo can report accurately - I know it's possible - and a little transparency isn't going to kill anyone. This is garbage.

Posted by jim at October 16, 2007 10:11

Theres a much bigger problem!

Right now, Yahoo!s API returns only 50 backlink
results, compared to the regular results it used
to in the past.

Any one else noticed that?

Posted by Prestige at October 23, 2007 12:24

Yes, people complaining about the API over at http://www.webmasterworld.com/yahoo_search/3471233.htm

Posted by Barry Schwartz at October 23, 2007 12:39