Yahoo Site Explorer Closes Down
23/11/2011
Yahoo has announced the closure of its Yahoo Site Explorer. This follows an algorithm transition to Bing that has taken a total of 20 months to complete.
Yahoo commented: “Webmasters should now be using the Bing Webmaster Tools to ensure that their websites continue to get high quality organic search traffic from Bing and Yahoo”.
Although upgrading Bing Webmaster Tools is claimed to provide a comparable service for desktop and mobile, the same level of back link data may not be available for SEO analysis.
This means there is no major search engine online which shows all the links to any site on the internet, as Google doesn’t report all the links on their Webmaster Tools.
However, there are some alternatives out there such as Blekko, a small search engine which provides an SEO link for most of its search results.
Blekko’s SEO analysis tool shows a wide variety of information including inbound links, duplicate content, crawl stats and co-hosts.
This is important news for internet marketers who rely on high levels of back link data. Crucially, this information is available to anyone rather than just verified site owners.
There are also plenty of free tools which can provide detailed information on backlinks, domain authority, page rank and a wide variety of other commonly used online marketing metrics, for example Open Site Explorer from SEO Moz and Majestic SEO’s Site Explorer.
So there are still tools out there for internet marketing managers to explore link data, however the loss of Yahoo Site Explorer marks a significant gap in the open sharing of SEO information.
