A few hours ago Yahoo! announced that they have completed transitioning back-end functions to Microsoft’s search platform for searches performed in the US and Canada (English), but what is the future hold for Yahoo! Site Explorer?
All three search giants have their own Webmaster tools available Google Webmaster Central, Yahoo! Site Explorer and Bing Toolbox. They all vary in usefulness but their aim is to supply tools to diagnose, fix and improve your site’s ranking in simplistic terms.
A concern of many site owners and webmasters is what happens to the data held for sites in Yahoo! Site Explorer especially with the Bing tool kit being the unloved step child of the Webmaster family for much of it’s lifetime till 17th August of this year.
It is expected that within the next week Bing will announce a possible transition including the critical data that both Bing and Google pulled out from the open web being rich competitive linkage data. Yahoo! have always retained allowing users to see what sites link to a domain outside of a Webmaster Tool.
It is expected that Bing utilise this data via the Site Explorer framework somehow but it is still unconfirmed. It could still potentially leave webmasters and search engine optimisation professionals to find alternative means to monitor competitors and find links rather than rely on this as their primary means.
Alternatives to Yahoo! Site Explorer for backlink data
- Majestic SEO provides competitive link intelligence. Free to use against your own verified domains but subscription based if wish to view competitor data. https://www.majesticseo.com/
- Open Site Explorer utilises SEOmoz’s web index to return link data for a named website. Depending on your level of subscription the number of link metrics differs. Registering for free provides a cost effective solution that many small site owners would benefit from. https://www.opensiteexplorer.org/
- Alexa provide back link data. It is not been designed to easily manipulate the data and perform any filtering but perhaps a useful tool to validate or find new opportunities. https://www.alexa.com/
- Exalead – The core of their business is providing enterprise search solutions for companies. Since 2001 they have mainatained and improved their web search facility. On the whole at time of writing it holds more backlink data than Google but less than Yahoo! Site Explorer. https://www.exalead.com/search/web/