Every few months or so, I get quite a few people contacting me with information regarding a sudden loss in backlinks as shown in Yahoo, this seems to happen two or three times a year, and I thought I’d just write a small post about it, because I know the first time it happened to me, I was quite concerned about seeing half my backlinks suddenly drop out of sight.
I’m not sure what the reasons for this are, and even after contacting Yahoo for any comments on the situation, I’m still at a loss for the reasons behind the shuffle. What I can tell you is that they generally drop approximately in half for a period of about a week, before returning to their approximate positions.
These drops aren’t accompanied by any loss in search engine rankings, in fact if anything I’ve noticed a slight increase each time these shifts take place. Perhaps like Google, Yahoo prefers to keep their motives behind these backlink changes private, and now with Yahoo search results being powered by Microsoft’s Bing, the transition to Bing powered searches for Yahoo are expected to be completed by 2010
Either way, as stressful as it is to those watching their backlink count on a regular basis, my advice to you is to not panic, they will probably come back within about a week’s time, and in the meantime, just keep up with your backlink building strategy. Backlinks aren’t something you can just do once, and hope they are done; it’s an ongoing process that will most likely last you the life of the website.
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