We Will Miss You! Yahoo! Site Explorer!

Launched in September 2005, Yahoo! Site Explorer allows many SEOers to see data information on a large number of websites, especially sites analytics of competitors. With the closing of this functionality on 21th Nov 2011, the SEO community is sure to be depressed. Yet the biggest headache is there is no such an equivalent function after the completion of algorithmic transition from Yahoo! Site Explorer to Bing.

Although many experts working in Bing said that they would soon add as many new features as possible, our users still find Bing currently does not present the useful information that Yahoo had once offered to us (competitors back links especially ). The reason to me should be Bing still has much room to improve their competitor analysis function.

Okay, since Yahoo! Site Explorer is gone, there is no need to moan about it. Instead, we should sincerely thank Yahoo for having offered us this service for 6 years and in the meantime, let’s wait and see if Bing Webmaster Tools will combine YSE service in the near future or not!

Here are some of FAQ Yahoo has posted on their official blog site:

Does it mean that I don’t have to optimize for Yahoo! and Bing Search engines separately in the future?

That is correct. We anticipate that later this year, Yahoo!’s organic results will be powered by Microsoft’s search platform in all parts of the world. After that point, any optimization that you do on Bing Webmaster Center tool will be reflected in Yahoo! organic search results.

Will the Site Explorer APIs be shut down?

The APIs were scheduled to be shut down at the end of last year, but the timeframe has been extended for the YDN Site Explorer API up until September 15, 2011.

Note: For BOSS Site Explorer APIs shut down information, scheduled for July 20, 2011, please see this April 2011 blog post.

Will Yahoo! continue to crawl my website?

Although the organic results will be powered by Microsoft Search platforms, Yahoo! will continue to innovate on the search experience beyond the services delivered by Microsoft. In order to provide Yahoo! users with an amazing search experience, our slurp crawlers may continue to selectively crawl websites to help support these efforts.