Yahoo Site Explorer Closing Down November 21st

[travelin cat]

Looks like the time has finally come to shut down the old workhorse:

[ysearchblog.com...]

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.

[edited by: engine at 11:33 am (utc) on Nov 21, 2011]
[edit reason] added quote [/edit]

[incrediBILL]

Bing WMTs are a joke.

I think most people serious about Site Explorer type functionality, especially a service that provides all the data you really need, have already bailed ship to the vastly superior Majestic SEO.

[lexipixel]

So what does this mean about Slurp crawling, Yahoo Site Verification files, etc ?

[Receptional]

This is the passing of an era for some of the SEO Old guard like me. We were just talking in the office about the day Site Explorer launched. As I recall there was some skepticism at the time, but how wrong we were and how much did it change our approach towards SEO over the years?

Hat Tip to the Yahoo Site Explorer team of old. Tim Mayer and Priyank Garg for what they achieved. Jason Duke showed me a Wayback Machine link to the original launch. September 29th 2005. 1:05 PM to be precise. They even talked about Webmasterworld [web.archive.org] in their original launch.

[shadows2000]

I think most people serious about Site Explorer type functionality, especially a service that provides all the data you really need, have already bailed ship to the vastly superior Majestic SEO.

An extremely sad day - particularly as Majestic and the other popular one both are inadequate. Once the yahoo api died it was all over really. Definitely time to invest and start my own crawling, even if I crawled the Alexa top 1m monthly, the data could potentially be far more useful than any other tool I've used.

Being on the highest Majestic package for some time, I can say their data is totally unusable due to the backlink limits as the raw reports counts nonsense backlink data. Amazing since they have so many (almost) free bots doing the work for them, I'm sure their developers have proper access to some useful data and their public service is some sort of inhouse joke.

[driller41]

So what to use for backlinks checking now?

[incrediBILL]

So what to use for backlinks checking now?

Not sure what shadows is talking about because everyone raves about Majestic, some use SEOMoz, others use Raven, some use all three. They all have their upsides but I think Majestic has the largest and freshest index out there, even compared to YSE!

[Olney]

It closed for Yahoo! Japan around last year. I forgot it might still be available for Yahoo.com

[serj]

It looks like it is working for me... not sure what that means that it is no longer working...

[Andem]

*sigh* We all knew this day was coming. I can't say that any of the paid-for solutions I've tried compare to Y!SE. Raven, Majestic and OSE don't seem that great to me.

[serj]

Whatever...we've been using ibacklinkpro, it's much better anyways...

[danwhitehouse]

There's been a lot of PR recently about 'trust'. I know that Open Site Explorer and Majestic get a lot of their data from Yahoo and Bing as Google doesn't divulge such link data in the way that Yahoo and Bing do. I'm a big fan of getting the sleeves up and going deep into webmaster tools and cross referencing findings with advanced search paramaters in Google. The thing is, the third party tools show ALL links, Google et al only really care about the links they can trust, which are in webmaster tools, but not necessarily the ones at face value. Very cat and mouse im afraid.

[randle]

[siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com...]

Looks like its toast - sad day for sure, it was an exceptional resource.

[shadows2000]

Whatever...we've been using ibacklinkpro, it's much better anyways...

Limited to 1000 backlinks, which for me, renders it pretty much useless...

[shadows2000]

The thing is, the third party tools show ALL links

And that is exactly the problem with these 3rd party tools, SEOMoz, Majestic and ahrefs all suffer from the same simple problem. Why is it so much to ask for just to return me all backlinks to a single website, with only one backlink per domain (and that one backlink should be the strongest link from that domain).

But instead no, they return everything. If the website has millions of sitewide links, you'll pay to get them all including; urls with endless paginations, urls with crawling errors (normally recursive) which haven't 404'ed, urls from duplicate sites on www and non-www and other subdomains, urls with potentially endless duplicates caused by setting different parameters in the url - particularly on search pages, urls that are simply erroneous with multiple slashes (ie. ///page.asp). Well after I've run the data through my own filters I find normally around 1-2% of the data is useful, and the rest, well that just ends up costing you, and I'm talking a lot if you run reports on popular domains. (with majestic prices over $100 per report - laughable right? The inbuilt filters don't help much either, and even if they did, the final kick in the &"*£ is the filters are applied AFTER you purchased anything)

[engine]

I guess with Yahoo, the free ride is now over. Thank you Yahoo.

We'll have to pay for the facility from one of the other commercial tools on the market.

Mod Note.
Anyone with feature or tech issues over the other commercial tools on the market should take it up direct with the tech support. We can't fix 'em here.
Thanks

[buckworks]

@danwhitehouse: Point of correction: Majestic does not use Yahoo, Bing or Google data; Majestic does its own independent crawl which visits or revisits something like 30 billion URLs a day.

@shadows2000: It sounds as though you are using the historic Index. Try the "Fresh" index which only returns links seen as valid within the last 30 days.

The historic index includes every link they've ever found in several years of crawling and it retains the data even if the links no longer exist. That can be crazy-making for some kinds of research but very useful for other things, such as assessing the longevity of old link campaigns.

FYI I am not associated with Majestic but (1) I have a friend who is, and (2) I subscribe to a tool which is based on the Majestic data set.

[Andem]

I grabbed as much data as I could from Y!SE while it lasted and now have a bunch of TSV files ready to be processed :) Sad day now that it's completely gone, which it wasn't when I first saw this thread.

[wyfwyf113]

Anyone knows some free tools to replace Y!SE?

[incrediBILL]

Anyone knows some free tools to replace Y!SE?

There aren't any.

Nobody can afford to crawl the web for free and store all that data in a very large bunch of servers and give it away for free other than a very large companies like Yahoo, Google, etc.

I read somewhere Bing might try to replace YSE.

[Rlilly]

This should really be a big issue. Its now impossible to quickly and accurately track the backlink gains of competitors!

[smallcompany]

Anyone knows some free tools to replace Y!SE?

One of the tools I use through Firefox has replaced Y!SE with Blekko.

Does anyone know if that's any valuable?

Thanks

[Alex997]

I signed up for a Bing Webmaster account today and pointed it at all my sitemaps/feeds.

My site is on page #1 for all of our target search keywords in Google, and for Yahoo/Bing we are lucky if we get on page #10! Bing has about 50% of our pages indexed.

I refuse to pay for back-links or directory listings (including Yahoo) so I am hoping Yahoo directory completely goes away to level the playing field a little.

Has anyone noticed if signing up for a webmaster account actually helps your bing SERPs?

[tedster]

No, just signing up doesn't help your rankings. However, making good use of the information you get just might.

[bbbsan]

I'm realy sad about that.