Based on my experience, the public results for Yahoo site explorer updates quite frequently vs. Google's link:www.domain.com One site Ive been keeping track of has around 70 links indexed in yahoo site explorer. A search of those links (checking the page source to be sure it wasnt missed) shows that around half these backlinks dont exist anymore. This was over 3 months ago, and they still show up in the site explorer results. I know for a fact that this isn't due to the public results being updated. Does this mean these backlinks still count for my competitor, even though they don't exist?
Why don't they exist? Have they been totally removed? If so, I can't imagine that links that have been permanently removed still count - that would just be a loophole that could easily be exploited.
Most of them are small-time blog comment type links, so its not like they would be temporarily removed. And yes, out of 70 or so, at least 30 dont exist. I check via searching the page source, so there's no way any were missed.