RIP Yahoo! Site Explorer, you will be missed.
For over 6 years Yahoo! Site Explorer has been an invaluable tool used by SEO professionals the world over to find backlink popularity from various different websites. Unfortunately, yesterday, the service was officially shutdown by Yahoo! which both for us personally and for many people across the world will be sorely missed. Yahoo! publicaly stated on Friday:
“With the completion of algorithmic transition to Bing, Yahoo! Search has merged Site Explorer into Bing Webmaster Tools. 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!. Site Explorer services will not be available from November 21, 2011.”
So, fear not! There may be hope yet with the new integration into Bing’s webmaster tools and it will be interesting to see if there will be further functionality added with this move that could result in better SEO. There are a few different services that can be used that provide similar functionality but they are often a lot more time consuming than the Yahoo! Site Explorer, one of which is the SEOBook toolbar that will show you the amount of backlinks from the page you are on but this can take a lot of time to do multiple sites. There is also the SEOmoz ‘Open Site Explorer’ which will allow you to search 1 URL at time but only offers limited information unless you are a ‘Pro’ member.
Hopefully we will see a flurry of new backlink checker tools appearing to become the new number one product but until then we can only mourn the death of what was a very handy tool! RIP Yahoo! Site Explorer 🙁 …
