“So long, and thanks for all the links.” That's just one of the many comments Yahoo received on its blog announcing that today, it would be merging its popular Yahoo Site Explorer tool with Bing Webmaster Tools. Many SEOs seem to feel like they're saying good-bye to an old friend.
The “death” of Yahoo Site Explorer has even inspired a eulogy over at SEOMoz by Michael King, to say nothing of write-ups at Search Engine Watch and Search Engine Land, among other places. The tool was born in September 2005. What is it about the closing down of a five-year-old tool that brings on nostalgia in SEOs?
Quite a bit, when the tool was YSE. Many SEOs started their career with this tool. It was free, after all, and at the time it came out, users couldn't get the kind of information it offered without paying through the nose. Not only did YSE give you complete information on your own site's links; it also gave you pretty complete information on links for sites you didn't own. Google has always been coy about sharing this kind of intelligence; at best, the search giant offers only a sampling of links, since their algorithm depends so much on links to determine a website's ranking.
As SEOMoz notes in its moving eulogy, YSE not only allowed you to get that information directly from them, but enabled other tools to deliver the same information. “Most importantly YSE we will remember you for telling us who linked to our competitors. This is how you truly changed the world. We respect you and commend for all your efforts and the API that once fed a variety of tools such as BackLinkWatch and the SEOBook Link Tool Suite. Your knowledge, speed and freshness will be missed,” King posted.
Although YSE is being merged with Bing Webmaster Tools, most observers do not believe that this particular capability will be preserved. To be fair, Microsoft has been updating Bing Webmaster Tools, as Search Engine Watch reported earlier this month. Now users can get a host of valuable information not previously available to them from BWT, such as malware alerts. It also seems sensible that Microsoft would include another of YSE's beloved functions: “your special ability to tell us about everyone else that knew about us and where they'd shared it on the web,” as King characterized it in his eulogy. In fact, as Thom Craver noted at Search Engine Watch, Bing Webmaster Tools now provides expanded “Crawl Details” information which includes all inbound link information, in addition to information about malware.
This may be comforting, but YSE's death still leaves many SEOs with nowhere to go for that all-important, accurate intelligence on their competitors' links. Or does it?
Yahoo Optimization 
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