This week the air has been a buzz with talk about Yahoo Site Explorer. It seems that recent tests have shown that if you are using Site Explorer to view statistics of a site, you will get two separate sets of data depending on you logged in status. People who are logged in as authenticated users of a domain are seeing drastically different numbers in terms of Indexed pages and inbound links.

Barry Swartz over at Search Engine Roundtable has some telling examples of Site Explorers Selective Data Publishing.

I can understand Yahoo!’s reasoning behind this if it is a permanent change, however it puts a dent in a marketers ability to accurately assess a site. Until now, Yahoo!’s “link:” command was the most accurate. Google has only shown a portion of the links they know about for years now and a few months ago MSN eliminated the search completely. Yahoo was the one last bastion to get reliable inbound ink data. It seems this is gone now too.

There are some people who are touting that you can still get reliable number from Yahoo if you use their API … We’ll have to wait and see on this one.

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