Increasingly over the years, search engines -- Google in particular -- have given more and more support to SEOs and publishers. But 2011 marked the first significant reversal that I can recall, with both linking and keyword data being withheld. Here's what happened, why it matters and how publishers can push back if Google and Bing don't change things. Where We Came From Some might believe that search engines hate SEOs, hate publishers and have done little over the years to help them. They are mistaken, either choosing to deliberately ignore the gains or, more likely, are simply unaware of [...]

Related Topics: Channel: SEO | Features: Analysis | Google: Critics | Google: SEO | Google: Webmaster Central | Link Building: General | Microsoft: Bing Webmaster Tools | SEM Industry: General | SEO: General | Top News | Yahoo: Site Explorer

As expected Yahoo will be closing down Yahoo Site Explorer this year. Yahoo has just announced the date for the closure. This coming Monday, November 21, 2011, Site Explorer will cease to exist. The short Yahoo blog post reads: 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. Bing Webmaster To [...]

Related Topics: Channel: SEO | Top News | Yahoo: Site Explorer

Yahoo has announced they are shutting down one of the old and beloved SEO tools, Yahoo Site Explorer, later this year. This isn't unexpected, and I am personally surprised it has been live for so long. That being said, the tool that launched on September 29, 2005 will be closing down "later this year" according to Hemant Minocha, Product Manager, Yahoo Site Explorer. Yahoo recommends that webmasters sign up with Bing Webmaster Tools and use that as Yahoo shuts off Site Explorer. Yahoo makes it sound like that you won't miss the old Site Explorer but I find it hard to believe that Mic [...]

Related Topics: Channel: SEO | Top News | Yahoo: Site Explorer

In the past week, several SEO related topics are in need of summarizing. Here is a list of quick SEO takes in bullet format, for you busy SEOs and SEMs: Google Webmaster Tools has added "total links" to the revamped link reports. Yahoo seems to have fixed the broken site explorer linkage data. Google has fixed the blogspot indexing bug and now can index new blogspot blog posts. Google Webmaster Tool's fetch as Googlebot is 404ing for some webmasters Google sometimes is using your heading tags for snippets as opposed to your title tags SEOs are noticing major ranking changes since Thu [...]

Related Topics: Channel: SEO | Google: SEO | Google: Web Search | Google: Webmaster Central | Yahoo: SEO | Yahoo: Site Explorer

Earlier this week, site owners noticed that substantial Yahoo Site Explorer link data seemed to be missing. A glitch? Gone for good? The first signs of integration into Bing webmaster tools? I talked to Yahoo and got at least some initial answers. Many site owners regularly use Site Explorer for information on external links to their own sites and competitive sites and since the announcement that Yahoo search results would be powered by Bing, many have wondered if Yahoo would continue to make this data available. On the Yahoo Site Explorer suggestion board, a message from Site Explorer produc [...]

Related Topics: Channel: SEO | Features: General | Link Building: General | Top News | Yahoo: Site Explorer

The Yahoo-Microsoft search transition is picking up momentum. Yahoo announced a number of things today relevant to the change over. They concern the organic search transition, SearchMonkey and Site Explorer. Yahoo announced that later this week the organic transition will commence for PC and mobile results in North America: This is an important step toward our goal of improving the overall relevance of Yahoo! organic search results and attracting a larger audience to Yahoo! Search, to ultimately put your ads in front of more potential customers. You'll want to make sure that you're pr [...]

Related Topics: Channel: SEO | Microsoft: Bing | Microsoft: Bing SEO | Top News | Yahoo: Search | Yahoo: Search Ads | Yahoo: Search Monkey | Yahoo: Site Explorer

One more piece of news from the "Ask the Search Engines" session at SMX West on Thursday: Yahoo and Bing are in the midst of discussions to decide the future of Yahoo's popular Site Explorer SEO tool. Yahoo's Arnab Bhattacharjee told conference attendees that the two companies are now going through discussions on how to transition from being competitors to the new situation where Bing will power Yahoo's algorithmic search results, and that Site Explorer is part of those discussions. Sasi Parthasarathy of Bing perhaps offered some reassurance when he said that users come first -- what is [...]

Related Topics: Channel: SEO | Top News | Yahoo: Site Explorer

SEOmoz has launched Open Site Explorer, a new tool that joins the already crowded field of link analysis tools. In choosing that name, SEOmoz is somewhat blatantly positioning it as a competitor, and perhaps eventual replacement, for Yahoo's popular Site Explorer tool. Open Site Explorer provides a number of data points pulled from SEOmoz's Linkscape tool and its index of the web. It shows stats such as overall link counts and a count of domains that link to a URL, along with anchor text distribution and more. A helpful feature is the ability to compare two domains side by side. Alth [...]

Related Topics: Channel: SEO | Link Building: General | SEM Tools: Links | Yahoo: Site Explorer

Yahoo continues to add new data to its popular Site Explorer tool and, for reasons unknown, doesn't tell anyone about it. Today, Barry Schwartz reported on Search Engine Roundtable about several new additions to Site Explorer's data: Key Terms Delicious Activities Top Delicious Tags SearchMonkey Objects Barry posted this screenshot showing the new features as they related to Search Engine Roundtable: It was just a month ago that Yahoo expanded Site Explorer with a new "Top Queries/Top URLs" feature. Webmasters and search marketers still wonder, though, what Site Explorer's [...]

Related Topics: Channel: SEO | Yahoo: Site Explorer

I noticed this morning that Yahoo has added a new feature named "Top Queries" to Site Explorer. I have not seen any announcement from Yahoo on this addition, but it seems pretty new. The tool shows you the top ten queries by day, week or month. It also shows you your top ten URLs by day, week or month. Yahoo classifies "top" by the number of impressions you received for those queries or URLs, but it also shows you the clicks. The last time we reported about new Site Explorer features was over a year ago. Back then, the action bar had less features, the one on the left is the old one an [...]

Related Topics: Channel: SEO | Yahoo: Site Explorer

By now, everyone has read all about the news that Yahoo is replacing its search index with Microsoft's Bing. In a way, it's a great story of complete reversal, as in 2002, Microsoft didn't have its own index and instead used Inktomi. Late that year, Yahoo! acquired Inktomi, which spurred Microsoft to start building its own search index to avoid having a search supplier owned by a major competitor. Now Yahoo is ditching its index (including all of the technology it acquired with Inktomi) to use the very index it motivated Microsoft to build. We've read about what this means for advertisers ( [...]

Related Topics: Channel: SEO | Microsoft & Yahoo Search Deal | Microsoft: Bing | SEO - Search Engine Optimization | Top News | Yahoo: APIs | Yahoo: Search Monkey | Yahoo: Site Explorer

The Yahoo Search Blog announced that they are testing out a new design for Site Explorer plus offering a variety of new stats about web sites. The new design is available for all to see at a special, beta URL located at http://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/new. As part of the new design, Yahoo added a site summary page that shows additional stats about registered/authenticated sites, including: + Site URL + Number of pages known + Number of pages crawled + Number of host on this domain + Number of inlinks + Number of inlink domains + Number of outlinks + Number of outlink domains Also, th [...]

Related Topics: Channel: SEO | Top News | Yahoo: Site Explorer

Last year on Christmas Day, Barry reported over at Search Engine Roundtable how Adam Lasnik and I spent a bit of time answering questions on the Google Webmaster Central forums. This year, Google Webmaster Trends Analyst John Mueller keeps up the tradition. In the spirit of the season, I thought it might be fun to take a look at the webmaster forums offered by the various search engines: a Christmas gift of search engine support. Google The Google Webmaster Central forums began as a Sitemaps-specific discussion area (originally launched in June 2005 in English and German), and in August 200 [...]

Related Topics: Channel: SEO | Google: SEO | Google: Webmaster Central | Microsoft: Bing SEO | Yahoo: SEO | Yahoo: Site Explorer

We reported earlier about Yahoo Site Explorer not showing all link data. Yahoo has just posted an update for us on that topic. Yahoo says to "disregard any counts for inlinks reported by Site Explorer from October 11 through next week." Yahoo is rolling out fixes for the tool over the weekend and throughout next week. Postscript: On November 6th, Yahoo announced they have finally fixed the issue. [...]

Related Topics: Channel: SEO | Yahoo: Site Explorer

Yahoo Site Explorer Showing Different Counts For Registered vs. Non-Registered Users from the Search Engine Roundtable is where I reported that Yahoo Site Explorer seems to be showing a lot more linkage data to a logged in user who authenticated their site in Site Explorer as opposed to a user who is not registered with Yahoo. For example, when viewing the linkage data for the Search Engine Roundtable as a guest, I see only 57,146 inlinks to the home page, but when I login under the username that authenticated that site, I see 216,880 inlinks to the home page. Do you think Yahoo is showing [...]

Related Topics: Channel: SEO | Link Building: General | Yahoo: Site Explorer

The Yahoo Search Blog announced a new Site Explorer feature that enables webmasters to inform Yahoo about dynamic URLs that might be creating duplicate content issues or crawl barriers. The new feature is named "Dynamic URL Rewriting," and it allows webmasters to view potential duplicate content issues and have Yahoo rewrite those URLs at the index level. Yahoo allows you to define which URL is the primary, and the remaining URLs will be dynamically rewritten to that primary URL. One of the most discussed advanced topics in SEO is duplicate content. Duplicate content can often be generate [...]

Related Topics: Channel: SEO | SEO: Domain Names & URLs | SEO: Duplicate Content | SEO: Redirects & Moving Sites | Yahoo: Site Explorer

Last November, Google, Microsoft and Yahoo united to support sitemaps, a standardized method of submitting web pages through feeds to the search engines. Today, the three are now joined by Ask.com in supporting the system and an extension of it called autodiscovery. This is where the major search engines will automatically locate your sitemaps file if the location is listed in a robots.txt file. Announcements are up from Google and Ask now Yahoo and Microsoft. Information on how to create sitemaps files can be found at the Sitemaps.org site. Aside from the sitemaps XML formal, you can al [...]

Related Topics: Ask: SEO | Channel: SEO | Google: SEO | Google: Webmaster Central | Microsoft: Bing SEO | SEO: Submitting & Sitemaps | Yahoo: SEO | Yahoo: Site Explorer

Site Explorer Matures a Bit More and Accepts Mobile Feeds from the Yahoo Search Blog covers how the Yahoo Site Explorer tool now accepts mobile submissions and feeds, gains the ability to input URLs for deletion and remove more than five at a time (see our Yahoo Site Explorer Adds Features: Delete URL From Index article for more about the remove feature in general), plus a new "Report Spam" button that's been added. [...]

Related Topics: Channel: SEO | SEM Tools | SEO: Spamming | Yahoo: SEO | Yahoo: Site Explorer

A reader emailed me today noticing that Google was showing a date next to his listing, which made me think this was a good time to revisit how, when and where search engines show crawl dates for pages. These dates are a useful way for site owners to understand how often they are being revisited or for anyone to "squeeze the loaf" of a search engine to see how fresh it is. Here's a search engine-by-search engine rundown on date display. I'll also cover how we've sadly lost crawl dates being embedded next to listings, over the years. But that's not all! Read now and you'll even [...]

Related Topics: Ask: SEO | Ask: Web Search | Channel: SEO | Google: SEO | Microsoft: Bing | Microsoft: Bing SEO | Search Features: Dates | SEO: Blocking Spiders | SEO: General | SEO: Titles & Descriptions | Stats: Freshness | Yahoo: SEO | Yahoo: Site Explorer

August of last year, Yahoo began pointing "link:" and "linkdomain:" without other search operators queries towards Site Explorer. Today, Yahoo will be redirecting "domain:" and "hostname:" queries to Site Explorer as well. So if you do a search at search.yahoo.com and it is using those query types, they will soon redirect to Site Explorer. It appears that this is not live yet, but Yahoo tells me it will happen today some time. [...]

Related Topics: Channel: SEO | Search Features: Commands | Yahoo: Site Explorer