Regional Inlinks (from Yahoo!)

I stumbled across this accidentally but I noticed the number of inlinks reported by Yahoo! Site Explorer decreased when using the UK and Ireland version.

A search term for www.facebook.com brings back 61,024,428 inlinks on the .com version. Adding /uk/ after the TLD resulted in 47,658,798 inlinks.

1. Global Search:
   http://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/search?p=www.facebook.com&y=Explore+URL&fr=sfp
2. UK Search:
   http://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/uk/search?p=www.facebook.com&y=Explore+URL&fr=sfp

I know Facebook is an extremely popular website in the UK but the differences don’t seem to tally up. I’m not 100% sure how accurate the regionalisation is but doing an automated whois on the first page of results returned that they were all UK servers (or registered in the UK).

If true (I haven’t had the time to have a more in-depth look) that will be a massive benefit to SEO when required to have backlinks from a specific country for relevancy. I didn’t know that this could be done and if inlinks are regionalised with Yahoo! Site Explorer then it’s a very useful thing to take into consideration.

Just a thought…