Google "link:" command and Yahoo Site Explorer: Sudden Change in Reported Links

[dustmonkey]

Hello all,

I'm having a bit of a problem with the results I'm getting from Google's "link:" command and Yahoo Site Explorer's link reporting. I know you never get accurate results from either of these tools, but even bearing that in mind I've no idea what's happening in my current situation:

There's a website that I report on on a monthly basis - it's a music news and reviews site, and I've been reporting on traffic and links and the like for three months. For the first couple of months everything has been fairly stable, but for some reason the number of links reported by Yahoo & Google have approximately halved.

It's really odd that BOTH Google and Yahoo should show the same kind of dip, but - and here's where the plot thickens - I also monitor the site's competitors, and all of them now report a similar (if not larger) drop in reported links.

I could understand it if the drop was just in Google or Yahoo, or if it just affected the main site I monitor, but the universality of the fall has really got me stumped. Anyone have any idea what might be going on here?

Thanks in advance for your help!

[incrediblehelp]

Google could just be devaluing a lot of those backlinks now from both websites.

[dustmonkey]

cheers for the help, incredible, but I don't know - I monitor about 15 other competitor's sites at the same time, and they've all suffered. The most dramatic drop is from 3320000 to 122294 in Yahoo, and one dropped from 1510 in Google right down to zero. I did wonder if, because all the sites are in the same niche they might be getting links from the same "neighborhoods" which have recently been devauled, but the sheer scale of some of the drops means that an awful lot of links are being ditched at once.

I'm all out of ideas on this one. Has anyone else noticed similar fluctuations in link reporting recently?