Farewell Yahoo Site Explorer!
Since its launch in 2005, the Yahoo Site Explorer tool has provided Web marketers with invaluable, accurate inbound link information and was much loved by the team here at digital marketing agency Intergage.
A great feature of this reliable tool was the fact that it drew data from a major search engine and also displayed the whole spectrum of inbound links to a site, not just a tiny snapshot or just those with a page rank higher than 3, as was the case with some of the other tools.
Gaining high quality inbound links to your website is such an important part of any SEO strategy and the Yahoo Site Explorer was an essential tool for understanding not only how many links were currently in place (Those with the highest page rank being listed at the top) but also the types of links pointing at competitor sites.
However, since all good things must come to an end – the Yahoo Site Explorer was sadly closed down on the 21st November due to the fact that it is currently being merged into Bing Webmaster Tools (but with limited functionality than before!)
So what does this mean for avid users of Yahoo Search Explorer? Where can we now find reliable and accurate inbound link information to assist our Web marketing strategies?
Well, there are a number of tools available which are of a similar nature to the YSE – however, the vast majority of these tools are not free of charge. Majestic SEO Site Explorer would be a good paid alternative – this tool does have a free version but it is of limited use unfortunately.
SEO Moz Open Site Explorer (OSE) is another great tool which offers extremely valuable information on inbound links including metrics such as page and domain authority.
However, for a good free alternative to the YSE – check out Blekko. Use their slashtags ‘/links’ and ‘/domainlinks’ with a URL or domain name to track down inbound links and also make use of a number of other SEO features on offer.
Don’t forget that you can also use your Google Analytics “Traffic sources” report to understand not only the types of Websites/Blogs/Forums etc.. out there that are linking to you, but more importantly – the amount and quality of traffic that they are driving to your site.
If you would like to talk to a member of our search marketing team about your search engine optimisation give us a call today on 0845 456 1022 and we will be more than happy to assist you!
Posted December 13th, 2011
