Traffic Flow SEO

Just started to notice Yahoo breaking away from its sister search engines, AltaVista and AlltheWeb. Since they all use the same master database to identify pages indexed and backlinks found for any particular site you would usually find very similiar numbers across all of these engines. So, for example, if you had 10,000 backlinks to your site all three engines would usually present that data give or take 10%, but now I am starting to see Yahoo break away and show drastically different results. I just tested Discover Directory (www.discoverdirectory.com) and found a big discrepency. For reference when I checked my backlinks (link popularity) today (Monday October 27th) here is what I found (as per AskMe backlink checker).


Discover Directory Backlinks:
AllTheWeb 3,160
Altavista 3,240
Yahoo 8,778

You will notice the big difference between Yahoo and AlltheWeb and AltaVista. What does this mean? Well, with limited resources it appears that Yahoo is starting to focus its attention on its own search engine (as also obvious from its new search only marketing campaign) and is letting some of its smaller properties fade away. Will these engines be turned off? Most likely not because Yahoo has a way of keeping anything alive that generates ANY positive cashflow (i.e. Search Submit Pro/Paid Inclusion, Yahoo Directory, etc.) even if the search industry has moved past these technologies.