Yahoo Shutting Down Site Explorer This Year

Jul 9, 2011 at 10:29pm ET by Barry Schwartz

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 Microsoft will provide detailed link data for competitors. Of course there are plenty of third party tools to get at this data, such as Majestic SEO and SEOmoz but with the loss of Site Explorer, there will likely be no search engine-provided look at your back links. Yahoo said:

The Bing Webmaster Center team has been actively adding new features over the past few months, including detailed traffic statistics and a new inbound links feature. Microsoft is also committed to build analytic reports that include Yahoo! search usage.

For more details, see the Yahoo Search Blog. No specific closure date has been set, but the APIs are set to close on Sept. 15, so it seems likely the service itself will close on that date.

Related Topics: Top News | Yahoo: Site Explorer

About The Author: Barry Schwartz is Search Engine Land's News Editor and owns RustyBrick, a NY based web consulting firm. He also runs Search Engine Roundtable, a popular search blog on very advanced SEM topics. Barry's personal blog is named Cartoon Barry and he can be followed on Twitter here. For more background information on Barry, see his full bio over here. See more articles by Barry Schwartz

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7 Comments on Yahoo Shutting Down Site Explorer This Year

Reuben Yau, July 9th, 2011 at 11:14 pm ET:

I’m assuming this also means that crawls from slurp will disappear.

Michael Martinez, July 10th, 2011 at 12:50 am ET:

One can only hope that Slurp vanishes from the Web.

Barry Schwartz, July 10th, 2011 at 6:16 pm ET:
Premium member since 01/2009

Reuben, it does not mean that. Mostly but Yahoo said they still will use Slurp on selective sites for richer search result usage.

Ian Goodall, July 11th, 2011 at 4:04 am ET:

I know it doesn’t have that large of an index, but Blekko provides link data.

Mary Smucker-Priest, July 11th, 2011 at 10:58 am ET:

I will miss Site Explorer. I use SEOMoz, but still instinctively go to Site Explorer for link data. Thanks for the update.

Eric Ward, July 11th, 2011 at 1:03 pm ET:
Premium member since 01/2009

Loved YSE, will miss it, but the backlink data party from the engines has been on last call for a while. You could watch the data getting less and less useful as years went by. Also, I have a really strong hunch something wicked this way comes. Wicked as in good. That’s all I can say.

Trent Hymas, July 16th, 2011 at 5:46 pm ET:

I loved using YSE along with SEOmoz. It was great to be able to use both of these tools. Sad to see it go.

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