Way back at one of the PubCons, Y!'s Tim Mayer, when pushed on that same question, cringed and answered with a (paraphrased), "Yeah, kind of, maybe, possibly for the first so many, take it as you think you see it and for what it might be worth."

That was pre- Site Explorer, but it still appears to hold at least somewhat true.

Yeah, the first batch have always included the most valued or whatever. However, #750 seems defitely not prioritized over 50,000 other links.

perceived quality of the site

Hmm...perhaps the sort of rank by perceived quality of something (page or link, maybe) but IMHO not the "site."

Some blogs link to my sites from every page, and Yahoo Site Explorer lists these as hundreds of distinct links. About 90% of every page (in Yahoo site explorer inlinks) are these blog links -- the other links are sort of sprinkled throughout.

If the links were ranked on quality of site these blog links should appear in a given range, not scattered throughout.

[edit]Removed exageration[/edit]

Way back at one of the PubCons, Y!'s Tim Mayer, when pushed on that same question, cringed and answered with a (paraphrased), "Yeah, kind of, maybe, possibly for the first so many, take it as you think you see it and for what it might be worth."

That is a great characterization of that moment. I have thought often about his response to that question and genuinely can’t decide if he just didn’t want to answer the question or he just wasn’t sure of the answer.

(if you ever get a chance to go to one of these things its well worth it just to see the difference in demeanor between the Yahoo, Google and MSN people. The Google people look like their genuinely having fun, the Yahoo people look like their sitting in a dentist chair, and the MSN people look like they just don’t know what to make of it all)

Taking a quick look at one of my sites I certainly didn't see any hierarchy that made sense even on the first page. An off topic blog comment showing on the first page of resultes wouldn't seem to make sense as a "high quality link".

The heirarchy does not take subject relevance, and several other factors into account.

It does seem to make some assessment of the strength of the page/site link is coming from. It also seems to factor in the number of outgoing links on the page. So a weak page, with very few outgoing, can be higher on the list than links from a stronger site with hundreds of outgoing.

That makes a little more sense but the blog I was speaking of would be a fairly weak site. I'll have to go take a better look sometime soon.

is anyone else noticing that the yahoo site Command is not showing NoFollow links now? IE - Only links from "normal" links are showing?

For me, the order of backlinks displayed by site command has been flaky the last week, and is substantially different today.

Is still mostly stronger sites at the top of first page, but the order doesn't seem as direct an indication of the strength of the link. just temporary, I hope...