Luckily, not all transitions happen fast. I am not sure for how much longer this will be working, but the transition to Bing has only affected the Yahoo.com site so far – not the regional sites. Just for the sake of a quick test, I checked a few regional versions of Yahoo for backlinks of Google.com and here is the result count I got (for the list of all Yahoo regional sites see here):

Yahoo! Austria – 765,000,000

Yahoo! Denmark – 767,000,000

Yahoo! France – 780,000,000

Yahoo! Germany – 783,000,000

Yahoo! Italy – 779,000,000

Yahoo! Netherlands – 784,000,000

Yahoo! Russia – 788,000,000

Yahoo! Spain – 783,000,000

Yahoo! Turkey – 734,000,000

Yahoo! UK – 784,000,000

Yahoo! Brazil – 778,000,000

Yahoo! Japan – 781,000,000

Talking of Yahoo! Japan, it will remain unaffected by this transition as it is a separate company and previously has chosen Google over Bing as its search results provider.

In the meantime, the linkdomain: command is still available via Yahoo! API (764,175,429 results) – at least at the time of this writing.

Looks pretty much like an Ask ripoff to me – but at least it’s a sign of some progress and clearly shows us Yahoo is not dead yet. I am pretty sure that even earlier today as I was using Yahoo I did not see this sidebar – but to be sure, I have also checked Yahoo’s Search blog – nothing there concerning this update. Anybody heard anything?

UPDATE: what’s much worse regarding this change is Yahoo also stopped displaying the total number of results for a query – arrgghh!

I do realize this is a glitch of some sort, but it still looks impressive

The interesting point about nofollow links is a different approach to links and their value. Loren Baker’s post says:

Goes to show that being covered by, participating in the comments of or obtaining a link from a blog or site using “no follow” link condoms are still of some search engine value (not to mention the real value – traffic and reputation).

- while I’d say, the real value might be much more important. I like to say, a link is a link, period. Don’t know whether “nofollow” stops the links from telling the search engines anything about a linked to site’s reputation – but the traffic bit is certainly there, and don’t forget that it’s not only the bots that are looking at the links but people do too, as well as click on them.

This bit is especially insightful:

So, even links from no follow coded pages can appear in Yahoo’s backlink index, as those links are actually being followed by search engines. I’ll also go out on a limb to say that the aspect of the no follow link is a bit outdated when it comes to search indexing & ranking, as even if those links don’t pack “ranking juice”, they will help to define you and your site’s:

* online reputation
* profiles of users who visit your site and sites they have visited in the past
* clustering of similar pages and content
* and identifying links to pages which may have not had SEO in mind when obtaining those links or contributing to such discussions.

Such variables, included in a new age algo (and some in published Google & Yahoo patent apps), sound quite revelant to me, even if those links have no “PageRank” or “SiteRank” juice.

Who cares about the old Page Rank when nowadays the number of variables involved is so much greater, making this so much more interesting?