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 Tools – as Google Webmaster Central does — will provide linkage data about a site that has been claimed within their systems. But neither provides information about sites beyond those that a publisher owns (see Bing Webmaster Tools Launches New Link Reports; Google Webmaster Tools Changes Theirs for more about these tools).
For years, Google has deliberately suppressed reporting all the links. This means with the loss of Yahoo Site Explorer, there is no tool from any major search engine that will show all the links pointing at any site on the web.
Small search engine Blekko, however, does provide these types of tools. And, there are third party free tools such as Majestic Site Explorer, and SEOmoz Open Site Explorer.
Postscript From Danny Sullivan: Now Yahoo Site Explorer has officially closed, with this page left:
Yahoo leaves some related links to its other services at the bottom, most of which make some sense in relation to the original audience of Yahoo Site Explorer. However, “Web Hosting” — which the arrow points to — kind of stands out.
Yahoo offers web hosting as part of its Yahoo Small Business area, which also offers things like domain registration and online stores. Why not point to the entire small business area, then?
My guess is that someone had the bright idea that all those links pointing to Yahoo Site Explorer over the years should be used to channel some potential traffic and ranking boost to the web hosting area. It’s not even identified as “Yahoo Web Hosting.”
Related Stories
- Yahoo Shutting Down Site Explorer This Year
- Bing Webmaster Tools Launches New Link Reports; Google Webmaster Tools Changes Theirs
- Blekko’s SEO Tools: What Information Do They Provide?
- Blekko Offers New Linkroll Widget & More Publisher Tools
- Link Building Tool Review: Link Research Tool Set By CEMPER
- Link Building Tool Review: SEOmoz PRO
- Link Building Tool Review: SEO Book
- Link Building Tool Review: Raven Tools
- How To Terrify Executives Into Linkbuilding
- Worthy Alternatives To The Useless SEO Data Provided By Search Engines
Image credit: kaarsten / ShutterStock.
Related Topics: Top News | Yahoo: Site Explorer
Im sure you meant to write coming Monday November 21st and not 12th.
Bye Bye Yahoo Site Explorer!!
Premium member since 08/2010
“there will likely be no search engine-provided look at your back links”
With the exception, of course, of Google Webmaster Tools.
What is the value of deleting comments, where ahrefs.com is mentioned? It is still a remaining site explorer, which people like and which is to admit.
Premium member since 01/2009
Links/Comments that are little more than self-promotional in nature are almost always removed. You might read our community guidelines for more information:
http://searchengineland.com/community-guidelines
This is sad news.I have been using yahoo site explore for my primary link analysis.I like majestic SEO but kind a addicted to yaho ‘s site explorer.Time to switch to the majestic site explorer.
It was inevitable but it still sucks that it is gone. As useless as Yahoo search results are I always loved this tool – Google Webmaster Tools only shows you the information Google wants you to see and 3rd party tools don’t have anywhere near the reach.
Majestic here I come.
Actually, this is a so sad news for we guys. bcz it was a media for our back link analysis. So now what’s and how we can??
Not that I use YSE any more as I find OSE much better, but I think YSE will be missed by meany.
But on a plus note: A. the site is still up and working for me! B. Those still using YSE can now move over to OSE which offers much better stats, or should I say offers stats for the links unlike YSE which simple listed links with no metrics to show how good or valuable the links where.
Very sad,as it was one of the few tools that I was using on the daily bases.
Ahref’s should be added as a resource, no question. They are good for developers and good at what they do.
We invite everybody to test the OpenLinkGraph from SISTRIX http://beta.openlinkgraph.net/
Can anyone give us a comparison of Bing Webmaster Tools vs. Google Analytics (and Goog’s Webmaster Tools)? I’ve been too Google-centric and it’s time to grow further into Bing.
I’m rooting for Bing to step WAAAY up and grab webmaster loyalty / some market share, since Google Analytics has upset so many with the “no provided” search terms thing. Does Bing seem to be jockeying to take advantage of this “void”?
This is sad news indeed.
I think everyone and their uncle used this great free tool for backlink analysis. I’ll be sorry to see it go.
However, I have tried some of Bing’s new tools, especially the ones where you can data from excel and they seem cool.
Wonder wheel, Search Timelines, search keyword reports and now Site Explorer.
Seems like all of the best tools are being taken away.
Very sad news! Well we’ve been expecting it for a whole year. Finally it comes to an end. RIP. YSE!
With the loss of YSE, here is a top 10 list of alternatives that might come in handy. The more I look, the more tools I keep finding that I have never heard about. There are several still on the to-review list that are likely going to be good candidates as well.
http://siteexplorer.co/top-10-yahoo-site-explorer-alternatives/
I keep hoping that somehow YSE will be resurrected via Bing, but the longer time passes the less likely it becomes. Bing was always good at being more lenient than google in their API when they returned up to 100K results rather than Google’s 1K. However, it seems that they let us down a little bit in this department, so there are several tools coming to the foreground that are starting to fill in the gaps.