Yahoo Site Explorer Shuts Down
It’s been in the works for some time now, but it seems like everybody kind of ignored it until it happened, and now it has. Yahoo Site Explorer has been shut down, and with it goes the free, and valuable, data that it used to provide to search engine optimisers and search marketers around the world.
And that means a lot of SEOs are scrambling for alternatives. And there are some alternatives. Unfortunately, most of them seem to be paid options, although there are a variety of them, and looking around would probably find something within your budget.
SEOMoz provides a couple of options for different budgets, and provides a lot more information than just site links. SEOBook, and their browser plugin can provide data for single pages, but it takes a long time if you’re looking at a lot of sites.
A variety of link building tools can give this kind of info as well, although it isn’t usually as straightforward as Yahoo’s tool was.
Search Engine Alternatives
Google doesn’t provide good link data. In fact, they deliberately suppress it. Bing, although taking over Yahoo, hasn’t offered any comparable tools yet, although some hope the will.
What’s really interesting though is beta search engine Blekko.
It claims to make all SEO transparent, and alongside each search result, they provide a drop-down allowing you to request links, seo data, ip data, and a range of other stuff that could prove quite useful, especially if we can verify its accuracy. We’re not sure right now about how accurate it is, but we’re testing.
With a good API, there’s the chance that this could be not only a good alternative, but actually even a better replacement.
Only time will tell though. And as always, we’ll keep you updated.
