Jun 14th, 2007
Yahoo Site Explorer Showing Link Quality?
Search Engine Roundtable recently wrote a post saying that it appears Yahoo! is ordering the links in their site explorer based on their perceived quality. They searched a few sites including their own and found this to be the case so I decided to try a few myself. I tried it on this site (SearchBanter) and it seemed to be true. The first three links seemed to be my highest quality links. Then I tried it on WebTargeted.com and I must admit it put some doubt into my mind about the whole idea. The first link is from searchtrends.org which really, is probably the most relevant link back to the site. But the second link is from halloweencostumesnow.com. This is an affiliate site we created a while back and the link is at the bottom of the page informing visitors who the site was designed by. There is obviously no relevancy to seo on the entire site. The third link is from Dmoz.org which, due to its placement, is just a little more relevant to webtargeted.com in my opinion. However, it is a directory link, and perhaps Yahoo! doesn’t see directory links as high quality links. Some of the links which follow this dmoz link are from blogs and other seo directories which, you may argue, could also be considered lower quality links than those higher up on the list. But then you get to the 10th link and it’s coming from the home page of redcrossut.org (we did some pro bono work for them). I believe that this link should be higher up on the “quality” list. Especially higher than the halloween costumes link. It’s a .org which may not even play a factor in the quality equation anymore, but it’s also from the Red Cross organization. You would think that would count as a fairly high quality link. Then again, maybe not.
My conclusion then? I’m still not sure, actually. I think I’ll have to do some more testing before I can be conclusive, but after writing this post, I actually think it may be the case. Yahoo may be showing link quality through their site explorer. If anyone else does any testing, let me know.