Guest Blogger: Corey Hammond

I was working on some client stuff the other day and I went to check their links in Yahoo. I normally use my Firefox search because it is defaulted to Yahoo and then I use the Google toolbar for Google searches. Anyways, I did the link operator as show below. For those of you who don’t know what this does, it will search Yahoo’s index for how many pages they have of your site. You can also use other search operators to find things like links (what I was really looking for).

Once I hit search, I then want to see what links I have back to the site. I normally filter my results to take our any internal links and then filter again to see links coming into the whole site and not just the page I searched.

To filter the results, you click the drop down next to “Show Inlinks:” and select one of the options. When I do this, I get redirected to Yahoo’s main search page. I was confused so I tried it again and it still didn’t work. I checked the urls then throughout the process and noticed something weird. When I do the site operator or link operator from Yahoo’s main search, it automatically redirects me to Yahoo’s Site Explorer, like it should. The interesting part is that it then gives me a url that looks like this:

http://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/search?p=http%3A%2F%2Ftkg.com&bwm=p&bwms=p&fr=sfp&fr2=seo-rd-se

This url is interesting because of the last part, the “fr2=seo-rd-se”. This looks like Yahoo is redirecting “SEO” traffic back to their main search when people are tyring these queries. It is almost like they are trying to filter out SEO search traffic or something. It is really annoying to not be able to do these queries from Yahoo’s main search. If you go to Yahoo’s Site Explorer directly, it allows you to filter the links without any problems.